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Shatner and Wheaton Narrate Mars Rover's Landing Sequence

Posted by Soulskill on from the to-boldly-narrate-where-no-one-has-narrated-before dept.

SternisheFan tips news that William Shatner and Wil Wheaton have each narrated a NASA video titled "Grand Entrance," which documents the upcoming descent and landing of Mars rover Curiosity onto the Red planet. Curiosity is the nickname for the Mars Science Laboratory, the largest rover ever sent to another world. It is scheduled to land on Mars on August 5 at 10:31PM PDT (August 6 at 05:31 UTC), and the event will be broadcast live on NASA TV. The landing process documented in the video will take about 7 minutes, and it has to go perfectly all on its own — the time delay caused by the 154-million-mile distance to Earth means that signals will take 14 minutes to even reach us. For further details, check out Wil's video or William's. NASA's fact sheet (PDF) has more information as well.

6 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Expected TL:DR Transcript by Narnie · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wheaton: We're still waiting for the first signal.
    Shatner: The... probe... must have... broken... up.

    --
    greed@All_Evils:~#
    1. Re:Expected TL:DR Transcript by Tanktalus · · Score: 4, Funny

      I was actually expecting Shatner to start with "Mars... The NEXT ... frontier."

    2. Re:Expected TL:DR Transcript by EdIII · · Score: 3, Funny

      Shatner: I'm talking with native Martian life. I want to get to the raw nerve.

      Yeah, somehow I doubt that. I've seen what Kirk does with the natives....

  2. Re:Oh Dear God No by kdogg73 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh my!!!

    --
    Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
  3. Re:To boldly go by VGPowerlord · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wonder which future NASA project will be narrated by Jeri Ryan

    Back when Voyager was created, Uranus was the 7th of the 9 planets in the Solar System.

    Therefore, she'll narrate when NASA goes to probe Uranus.

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  4. Re:Oh Dear God No by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 4, Funny

    Considering the time lag in sending instructions to the rover, getting Shatner to... issue... the... commands... would probably fix the time delay problem (assuming he could synch up with the rover's communications lag).