Where To View the Mars Curiosity Landing
An anonymous reader writes "In addition to the NASA mission pages here's a decent list of links showing where you can view the Mars Curiosity Landing online or at an event. Does anyone have recommendations for other sources of coverage on August 6?"
I would say there's plenty of great reasons for wanting to watch this - witnessing a fairly major event in history (possibly even more major depending on what it finds on the planet), seeing science hard at work, watching how millions of dollars and collaboration between thousands of people can pay off.
However, ultimately, the reason many people will be watching is purely to be there if something goes wrong. There'll be fireworks, or at least some sort of graph that suddenly dips.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
It's where NASA films all their best stuff.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I'm pretty sure NASA/JPLs first concern is: "How can we get the highest television ratings for this mission?" The thinking went something like this:
Mission control:
"OK guys, we're up against the Olympics most of that week, but market trend analysis show that most people will be tired of the Olympic stuff by Sunday at 5:00pm. However, we are looking at back-to-back "Family Guys" in the 5:00pm to 6:00pm slot, and we'll never make numbers against that. in the 6:00pm to 7:00pm slot we're up against TMZ and "Simpsons" we'll lose a lot of the geek demo there, uh, let's see... "Big Bang," no... "House," no... no... no...
I guess gentlemen, we're looking at 10:30pm. We'll be losing a big portion of our share to a "McHale's Navy" rerun, but any later and we're up against "Twilight Zone" - we won't have a chance.