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Curiosity Lands On Mars
The Mars Science Laboratory, a.k.a. Curiosity, is now less than an hour from touchdown on Mars. It's scheduled to land at 1:31 AM EDT (0531 UTC). The landing will be monitored by the Odyssey orbiter, which will be the data relay between Curiosity and Earth. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be listening to Curiosity as well (yes — two of our probes orbiting another world will be watching a third). While Odyssey will be giving us close to real-time updates (as close as possible, given the 14-minute time delay), MRO's data will take a bit longer to be processed and evaluated. NASA is broadcasting from the JPL mission room right now. If you'd like to watch a pretty awesome graphical visualization of the mission, check out eyes.nasa.gov. If you'd like to play around with a Java app showing Mars-local times and seasons, check out Mars24. If you'd like to watch unofficial coverage, Bad Astronomer Phil Plait and a bunch of other astronomers are hosting a public Google Hangout. If you'd like to read a detailed explanation of the landing, checkout NASA's press kit (PDF), and there's also a post about what to expect when the rover starts sending pictures back to Earth, which will be about two hours after the rover lands. Good luck to everyone involved! We'll update this post when we get word on the landing.
Update: 08/06 05:33 GMT by S : Curiosity is on the ground! Everything looks nominal, and everybody at JPL is cheering. Congratulations, folks. They're continuing to receive telemetry from Odyssey, and the connection is strong. They've now received the first images back from Mars of Curiosity on the ground. A press briefing is scheduled in a little bit (2:15AM EDT, 0615 UTC), and several more throughout the day as more data comes back.
Update: 08/06 05:33 GMT by S : Curiosity is on the ground! Everything looks nominal, and everybody at JPL is cheering. Congratulations, folks. They're continuing to receive telemetry from Odyssey, and the connection is strong. They've now received the first images back from Mars of Curiosity on the ground. A press briefing is scheduled in a little bit (2:15AM EDT, 0615 UTC), and several more throughout the day as more data comes back.
Richard C. Hoagland will be on describing the Martian civilization that NASA is hiding from us.
Yes let's have another Apple/Linux/Microsoft article and pass on a momentousness moment such as this. After all this is Slashdot...
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
The best-quality streaming video of the event from JPL that I've found is over at Ustream.
FYI, FWIW, HTH.
Kid-proof tablet..
Check out http://eyes.nasa.gov/
From the page:
""Eyes on the Solar System" is a 3-D environment full of real NASA mission data. Explore the cosmos from your computer. Hop on an asteroid. Fly with NASA's Voyager spacecraft. See the entire solar system moving in real time. It's up to you. You control space and time."
and
"Eyes on the Solar System lets you ride with Curiosity all the way to the surface of Gale crater. Preview the events of Entry Descent and Landing, or watch live!"
One more - a JPL engineer yelling "Suck it, K'Breel", in about 28 minutes.
As many as it takes until we know what happens to this awesome nuclear powered rover with frikin lasers on another frikin planet!
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
It would really suck? what are the odds of successs anyway?
It's scheduled to land at 1:31 AM EST
EDT!
not bad
It is - the question remains whether intact or not. We're just waiting for the radio signals to arrive.
Speed of light can be soo damn slow ...
Great writeup with the links.
Let's go, Curiosity! You the Rover! :-)
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
"Relative to whose frame of reference, blueworlder?"
The Council of Elders has confirmed the interception and destruction of the latest mechanized terror from the blue world.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, addressed the planet thus:
When a junior combat reporter pointed out that the link between the carrier vessel and the mechanized invader may have been designed to be broken at the moment of landing, that the actual threat was the so-called "power source" and not the flying invader, and suggested that if the Martian Defense Force had just waited just a few seconds longer, the squibs holding the skyhook to the skycrane might have failed, resulting in the carrier vessel crashing down upon the invader, thereby destroying both, K'Breel had the combat reporter's gelsacs placed directly in front of the dormant invader's photonic weapons.
"If the blue-shirted denizens of the blue world seek evidence of organic matter so strongly," mused K'Breel, "then let them have their fill of it!"
(Because the Council must to draft at least two of these press releases with every new phase of the battle, the Speaker would like to thank the infiltrators at the Martian Cyberdefense Detachment (unit 216.34.181.48) for remaining as glued to the screen over the past fifteen units of time as everybeing on the Council was.)
Curiosity is ON THE SURFACE.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Rock on!
We have a touch-down.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
AFRAID NOT! Touchdown Confirmed!!
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Touchdown! All went well! \o/
Waiting...
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Suck it, jackass.
Congratulations to all those involved. I raise my glass to you.
its a wheel
Now show us some pictures from Mars instead of happy nerds hugging each other
That sounds great! But where is her boyfriend?
Well nice knowing you guys. Life as we know it ends once that clears around Mars.
Congradulation NASA! I hope they increase your funding and reduce funding for wars.
God spoke to me
Orange dirt.
Close up.
Cool.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
And the gold medal for the all-species 350M KM space landing goes to NASA, who scored a perfect 10 for landing on the surface of Mars!
Congratulations to NASA and the JPL. Dare Mighty Things indeed.
Surprise, surprise, actual scientists and engineers are better than you at this stuff.
Congratz NASA! WHOO! Now for a manned mission!
Apparently it worked this one time...
I'm absolutely amazed that doing something like this is even possible. All of the people who put this together are heroes to me. Fuck yes. This is awesome.
I don't respond to AC's.
These guys started posting doom and gloom post before liftoff.
They've been at it 8 months, and even when its wheels down they still continue to nay-say.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
My natural geek bias is coming out, but this defines team sport and puts the Olympics to shame. Phenomenal achievement--congratulations to NASA and JPL!
If not us, who? If not now, when?
My 4 week summer holiday just ended. Nice to see the landing, but now I have to go to work. Touchdown.
suck had to watch CNN to get the landing. How sad no other station on regular cable carried the landing.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
This claims to be a landing pic, but it hasn't landed yet. WTF?
https://twitter.com/NASA/status/232350219700932608/photo/1
Table-ized A.I.
inorite? Because we land car-sized nuclear-powered portable science laboratories on other planets all the fucking time, right dude?
"News for Nerds, stuff that matters" - This qualifies as both. And we'll probably have a nonstop stream of Curiosity FPs over the next few days. Suck it up or find another site, because as much as I hate to sound exclusionary, it sounds like you jus' don't belong here.
This mission was 2.5 billion or so. I have to think the incremental cost of flying another now that the research has been done would be far less than that. There are individuals in the USA who could personally fund that without breaking a sweat.
Seems like we should have 4 or 5 of these things in various places on Mars.
Anonymous Coward indeed.
Huge thanks to NASA/JPL for pulling this thing off, and letting everyone be a part of it.
I was watching a live simulation of the thing full-screen on one monitor (eyes.nasa.gov), and watching/hearing commentary on Nasa TV on another. It was very thrilling.
As a geek, foremost I find myself going WOW> HOLY !!! WE JUST LANDED A WINNEBEGO [ok, it's a bit smaller than the average Winny] ON MARS!!!
But I also find myself impressed that the Ustream link I posted (above) had something like 230k viewers at peak, and despite the load it never missed a beat for me. The simulation appeared to be happening in with very low-latency, and provided spectacular imagery.
Politically, if these methods of passive involvement were more widely publicized, funding the space program would be a no-brainer for any American -- just for the excitement involved, if nothing else, of accomplishing such a difficult task.
Wish I could link to the first photos (there seem to be two of them), but they don't seem to be officially posted just yet....
Kid-proof tablet..
I just watched the whole thing through a computer simulation in my web browser (the new TV)...while the play by play was being streamed live from the control room.
I actually just commented to a friend that tonight was a demonstration of one of humanity's best uses of the internet since porn.
I'm unsure how you managed to screw up the experience but it really was awesome.
YOU fail it. MSL FTW!!
GOOOOOALLL!
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Wow, I feel like I haven't felt in a long time. I feel proud to be an American.
Kudos to NASA, and a big "fuck you" to Congress for cutting their funding.
With any luck, these excellent news from the science world will push back the barrage of useless "events" from the olympics marketing machine.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Don't know if trolling or just doesn't understand the kind of bandwidth you don't get during a complicated high-speed descent that ends on the far side of another planet. Why don't you just call up AT&T and get them to install DSL on the rover? Or maybe you can crank your wifi router up to get a better signal.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
laptops there in NASA.. http://news.discovery.com/space/live-mars-rover-curiosity-landing-120802.html
I was watching the broadcast live, very exciting indeed. The description of the events sounded like it was real-time when in fact there is a delay, however they react and comment based on the transmission they received, I did head something curious "we would steer Curiosity if ..." which is impossible, they can't steer, curiosity steers itself mainly because of the delay.
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I wanted to see footage of the lander as it performed it's crazy descent. But that is too much for NASA to handle, I guess.
Engineer and manufacture the necessary equipment to do that, and I'm sure NASA will be happy to include it in their next Mars mission.
First images available at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/
The first encounter with alien life has not gone well. A catlike alien has been squashed and killed by Curiosity.
You, sir are an idiot.
SUCK IT, HATER. Down and clear!
I'm sorry, yelling filter, this dumbass deserved it.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Sky crane for the win. I had images in my head of hovering Eagles from Space 1999. :-)
NASA once again makes Mars her bitch. Way to go! Seriously, this landing was so complicated, I was expecting the worse. I join millions of others around the world in breathing a huge sigh of relief.
This ad space for rent.
I was just thinking how awesome it was watching NASA TV compared to NBC Olympic footage, and then she goes and pulls a Costas, pulling away just as they were reading out some cool technical details.
REALLY annoying. If I'm watching NASA TV let me in on all the technical details possible please!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, how many "Curiosity is About To Land" articles do we need today?
You might want to turn in your nerd badge and remove slashdot from your bookmarks. Try www.disney.com instead.
No sig today...
I wonder how long these artifacts will be lying on the Martian surface. Quite a bit more weather than the Moon.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
We are not alone
Nominal, dude. And with ~140kg of fuel to spare of the original 390 or so.
They could have gone around the block again before parking.
Congratu-fuckin-lations everyone at JPL & NASA and anyone that had a hand in this.
I was rivitted to my screen for 2 full hours and was almost as ecstatic as the control room as each stage's success came in.
Poor gf can't be much bothered and is trying to watch a DVD with me calling out each stage and cheering... Sorry gf, no apologies - this is fucking GREAT!
I love posts like yours. You try to come off all smart, but all you do is tell the world what a gigantic and utterly useless fuckhead you are. Please walk in front of a bus tomorrow, or maybe start by looking at the relative distances between the moon and Mars. No, forget it. Just do the bus thing.
The first car on Mars. The martians get the first glimpse of earth's dominant life form! Watch out, the whole place will look like LA in 10 years tops.
Is that friking lazer glues to a mini shark in a little fish bowl on the rover?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Seriously, I think we need more. This is great news. Much better then bloodshed etc. Isn't it nice to get some good news for a change?
Are you fuking serious? I know geeks like to think they are the super geniuses of the world (in the style of Wyle E. Coyote), but this is beyond ridiculous.
Well, shit, there sugarcube, maybe you should mosey on down to JPL and set those folks straight.
Sad that you say so much, with so little behind it. When we first started landing rovers on the moon, it was in preparation for landing man on the moon. Because the moon has no atmosphere, the landers come in SLOW and it is 1/6 G, it made it fairly simple on how to land. Mars is different. We have to arrive a great deal faster, we have an atmosphere to deal with, and 1/3 G. As such, there are MANY more issues to landing there. This was actually, one of the most difficult landings done on a planet since the early days. We could only test parts of it. No way to fully test it.
BUT, from here on out, we will see larger payloads going to mars. In fact, the next American one might be red dragon. That would double the amount of science on Mars. The same craft can be used on the moon to land cargo AND humans.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://i1214.photobucket.com/albums/cc481/grumpfuk/AzmA53zCEAAmuyS.jpg
So, anyone keeping score?
Saw lots of Apple laptops there at JPL in the video. :-)
I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!!
i know an engrish translation when i see it.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
ALL the articles!
It's a delight to see them doing&winning the cool stuff again.
The Moon landing was live. The return to Earth was blacked out. What do Mars and Earth have that the Moon doesn't?
I heard Curiosity about to land on Mars. Make post pls.
Yes, an amazing achievement. I wonder if they burned it all off, or made a fireball somewhere.
I watched the landing live on an internet stream, unedited. It had bonehead commentary from that woman, but it wasn't too bad.
Meanwhile for the NBC Olympics I can watch EVERY EVENT live unedited with no NBC commentary. And I have watched many.
So I don't get how the NASA coverage is better except that it's free.
If you think watching the event live with no commentary is better, don't watch the primetime coverage instead. This goes for the Olympics, it goes for the Curiosity lander.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
... but surely they could have afforded a colour camera for the Curiosity rover.
Message from Curiosity: Landed safely. Initiating primary directive - kill cats.
“We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.”
Carl Sagan,
Congratulations NASA and JPL! I hope you continue to inspire us all to dare mighty things!
It's obvious that god put it on Mars, then.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Well, yeah. That's what unix nerds tend to use for their mobile devices. Apple laptops are easily the most popular laptops I've ever seen among us engineering types at Sun and Oracle in the last decade.
No, because we're still busy spending seven trillion dollars to bailout financial institutions while simultaneously pissing ourselves over the "massive" NASA budget for trivial shit like furthering the reach of all fucking human-kind.
This senseless act of violence against the people of Mars is unacceptable. The impact of a NASA weapon of mass destruction rattled several homes while Martians were trying to watch the Olympics to see who won the women's football game between the US and New Zealand. Most Martians were asleep and had to wait for the rebroadcast. This traumatic event must be compensated for to make right the horror that the Martian citizens faced when the rover impacted the surface of Mars. The lawsuit demands a trillion dollars in compensation but it's believed they will accept 10,000 iPhone 5s as a compromise.
Go girl! :-)
Ciao
Science FTW! Now just to plug my brains into that machine to experience what robot feels.... oooo.....s....s.ss..s.s..ooooo...cc.c.c.c.c.c...cccoldddddd
Never mind him!
Let's keep the updates coming!!! More articles! Can't wait. So excited. Maybe this is how our forefathers felt when 11 landed on Moon.
Given a finite pot of money (say $2.5B), we could have done truly new things.
Why did have to go back to Mars for the nth time with yet another rover when we could visit Europa instead which is COVERED IN WATER and probably liquid beneath.
The reason we didn't was (1) a bunch of vested interests and (2) fear that it would have been a harder sell to congress. This is the source of our stagnation.
gotta have sponsors.
Hey, what's the long horizontal streak in the middle of the photo? Crane cables?
Table-ized A.I.
Apparently it worked this one time...
So, 100% success rate for this landing technique then?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
So now Richard C Hoagland is saying that the probe will find evidence of some life on mars at some point in some form and this will through out all the government can't do anything political speech and Obama will get reelected with a renewed focus on space exploration.
Improbable and as much as he's crazy, I hope he's right :)
Amusing to listen to anyway.
Or I don't know, we have experiments to carry on Mars because a rover is small and a lot had been put out of the other ones and we have no clue about how to land under the ice of Europa. But, no, it's probably your explanation. Seems more realist.
Oh, yeah, and keep complaining. Do not rejoice about any success, nerver. Keep the good spirit.
Wow! Amazing job, JPL and NASA!!
(Your) Ignorance appears to not generate the assumed bliss.
It was a one in a million shot. Of course it worked.
right...
I think Obama said we were supposed to be working towards putting people on Mars. I get confused... I think Bush v2 said the moon.
But give it 5 years, the plan will change. We spend so much time dicking around with the $33 per person, per year, we spend on NASA... it seems crazy. I mean, we each spend thousands of dollars per year on our military. Like, work for a month or so only to donate it all to the DoD. And they spend it on a handful of multi-billion-dollar models of planes that still don't work, while sending kids out to get blown up with no armor, short-changing veterans on medical services and such... always complaining about budget constraints while nobody important ever seems to question how they spent their money. By comparison, NASA is a fantastic bargain.
Watching the NASA feed I was so glad to get a virtual boner from the fact there wasnt a single toy system in the room. I was so glad to see Sun, MACs and Linux systems fully represented.
No IBM ??
No Cray?
o0
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
oh boy more pictures of rocks! and comon blakc and white? we've been working in color for 50+ years here.
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
Apparently it worked this one time...
So, 100% success rate for this landing technique then?
Yes though I am not about to trust my life to it just yet.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That was the easiest foe assignation I ever did. Say goodbye.
Wow !
Can you imagine that?
NASA is landing the rover but the Japanese are doing a better coverage on that landing !!
http://www.ustream.tv/ is a Japanese site, btw
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
We couldn't touch Europa with a mission like Curiosity for 2.5 billion. Not for ten.
And even if we could, we don't know enough about it to even begin to spec out a useful mission. Or a mission with the slightest chance of success.
What everyone else said, plus contamination risk. Obviously curiosity is clean-room assembled and supposed to be sterile, but it won't matter if a few hardy spores persist on its chassis somewhere since they won't affect the experiments or be viable on Mars. With a probe designed to enter the vast ocean of Europa it's theoretically possible they could survive. Let's see if we can pull it off on Lake Vostok first before we think about trying to fly a robot halfway across the solar system to do the same thing all by itself.
As you guys probably know, half of the websites that feature NASA TV stream are blocked in China. Connection to NASA's website is not very stable. I am not sure if it is because they cannot handle the load, or the GFW is jamming the network.
I have my own OpenVPN tunnel, and it seemed that NASA's official TV stream was particularly slow.
So it would be nice if anyone with some experience of Chinese Internet can post some links.
I wish I was in the UK (where I normally live), so I can get a stable stream.
For Europa we need to drill through 20 km of ice. We can do 4km in 10 years (like Lake Vostok). But 20 km autonomously. Not in the near future. And where do we drill. We learnt from Viking not to be too ambitious. And I think your fantasy is getting mixed up with your reality. Also we go to Mars because it's the best chance to find life. They are only rocks to you because you never bothered to actually *look* at what is there.
Is she awesome or what? She so has The Glasses.
Isn't it nice to get some good news for a change?
This just in. A Slashdotter got laid. A once in a billion happening.
All must bow before the power of science!
Correction. Machine-kind.
Sadly, the Martians are a feline race. Looks like a violent slaughter lies ahead.
I like my spaghetti with source.
What about the poor Martian this US colonizing robot landed on eh? And the sky crane carelessly thrown away? Flattened a Martian orphanage but I bet the US press won't be reporting on THAT!
Why doesn't NASA release a statement they are going to stop killing Martians in their stellar conquest?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Congrats NASA.
I'm so pleased and proud...beats the London Olympics anytime.
I didn't think that complex landing scheme would get 100% of so many functions to work together the first time.
Whew.
First image, of what looked like a sunrise on Mars plus a wheel of the rover, was GREAT. Best landing photo yet. You could not have lined that up any better.
I think the plan was for the sky crane to fly away until it used the remaining fuel.
I was pleasantly surprised when my wife watched with me, even more so when she actually got into it.
Also whoever nodded you offtopic was likely sitting home alone with a cat and abag of cheetos during the landing.
I was so glad to see Sun, MACs and Linux systems fully represented.
Not on the laptops.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Ok, I'll call Apollo and ask what they used. You know, forty years ago.
Obligatory xkcd:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/curiosity.png
Nobody cares about a landing on either? I wonder why that would be. Surely it has nothing to do with the inaccessibility of it when it is just described to us like we have time warped back to the era of radio. Yes, it must just be that people are all a big bunch of stupid heads now.
Noting that they didn't do what Apollo did forty years ago is the opposite of ignorance. Indeed, it seems that the rabid geeks on here don't know anything about what makes actual human beings tick, and absolutely refuse to accept any sort of criticism, or even comparison to past achievement.
That's all great and all, but where is the footage!?
It's like no-one remembers the awe-inspiring first moon landing. Well here, let me fucking remind you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOGsNzC7v_4
Secondhand radio is a giant leap BACKWARDS. Look at that video from 40 years ago, and tell me why kids aren't interested in space anymore, while they were back then.
That, and you, are stupid. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOGsNzC7v_4
43 years ago, and they managed to transmit this, but with all of our technology, we apparently can't for some reason, and anyone who asks why is met with a dozen comments of pure NERD RAGE. No wonder this country is going down the tubes.
Send up Bruce Willis and his drilling team, they'll get that done in no time. :)
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
All these worlds are yours except Europa.
Attempt no landing there.
Congratulations to a job extremely well done. This is coming from someone who was inspired by the Viking missions (actually snail-mailed a request to get a NASA 8x10 of a Viking shot) to go onto getting an engineering / computer science degree. It was inspirational to me then, as it is right now!
It's either this or Bitcoin. I prefer this.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Looking for information about how close the lander came to where they originally wanted it to land.
Moon. Mars. Do you understand the difference?
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
No, you're just a flaming idiot. Really, the bus suggestion a few posts up? Go for it, improve the gene pool for us.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
He's just drunk too much of the Microsoft Kool-aid. He doesn't understand how it can possibly work until Service Pack 1 is installed.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Again, the scenarios are vastly different, and what you are suggesting would in fact not even be possible. The fact that you still don't understand this is proof positive that the rather violent suggestions you have received are justified. Take your self out of the gene pool, please.
He does ask you a relevant question. What does Mars and Earth have in common, which the Moon lacks? Why is it that you have never seen a live feed from the re-entry of a space shuttle? If you have seen the movie "Apollo 13", towards the end of the movie, what was the suspense about? Control room, ship, wife, movie audience all holding their breath. What were we waiting for, and why?
Now, once you have pondered these things and considered the bandwidth needed for a live TV feed, please ponder the following concept "far side of the planet". What does that mean? How might it impact the ability to send a live, high-speed, feed directly to Earth? Assuming that light mostly travels in straight lines, how would you, for example, use light to do this? How would you use a high-frequency radio signal (needed for the transfer of a live feed.
Back to the movie "Apollo 13", there was another suspenseful sequence in the film, where the crew was unable to communicate at all with the ground station. This was when they were out by the moon. Very suspenseful. The word "dark" is frequently used about the suspense-creating situation. What was it and how does it pertain to landing a vehicle on the far side of another planet?
The yanks take a lot of sh1t from the rest of the world, and sometimes rightly so.
But when they do things like this we remember why we love them.
Congratulations. A day to be proud.
I can't find my cat. Did that spaceship have anything to do with my missing cat?
Your entire post is so ignorant as to how high bandwidth broadcasting works that one would have to start from the basics.
Um, the moon is close, really close as in compared to mars. It takes a whole lot less power to send a signal back to earth.
The moon is close, you don't have to aim your signal so well to hit earth. Your antenna size is smaller.
No direct line of sight to earth. It's on the far side of the planet to us. Any live signal would have to be transmitted via the MRO, if it's in line of sight at the time.
Re-entry blackout. The moon has no atmosphere, mars does.
Weight, landing on an atmosphereless, low gravity moon is a lot easier then landing on mars, rather then all the complicated heavy shit for landing cameras, save the payload for 'once we've successfully landed' science missions.
They should put a network of nuclear powered gas stations on Mars so that rovers can move long distances and recharge along the way without depending on solar power or their own internal power. Such stations could be put near interesting phenomenon needing exploration.
E Proelio Veritas.
Make sure to include Aerosmith - he'll need a kick-ass theme tune :D
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
I've read many times about the "fly away" but I also know that part of the nominal early mission is to find it and image it. If it still has half of its fuel, it could (with no rover weighting it down) maybe gain 500 meters per second of delta-V, which might put it pretty far away if they burned to exhaustion.
So you can't. Plus imagine the angular error multiplied by the distance? You can pretty much just point an antenna at the Earth if you're on the Moon. The Earth is RIGHT THERE. On Mars, the Earth is a tiny target. Just a tiny way off and your signal is going to zip by the Earth.
Also, Discovery just landed and it takes 14 minutes for signals to travel there. You want to boot up the whole thing in one shot with absolutely no hope of anyone pressing reset up there?
We could do a similar mission to Europa for $4B. Not unlikely given that JWST alone is 6B.
The Deep Space Network hasn't received any major upgrades since the Voyager probes were launched. There's room for improvement, but building antennae that can stream live video from the surface of Mars would be rather expensive and in my opinion unnecessary. I wonder if it's possible to build something like the Square Kilometer Array, i.e. simple, fixed antennae that are steered in software to upgrade the DSN, while also being able to communicate with multiple probes at the same time.
Nominal, dude. And with ~140kg of fuel to spare of the original 390 or so.
They could have gone around the block again before parking.
Somewhere, some scientist is thinking "they could have flown my instrument and still have 100 kg of fuel left over !"
By the way, who were they tweaking when they read that out ? It sounds like he says "sorry, van Tooma, we have 140.6 kg." Was that some prominent nay-sayer ?
Of course not. But NASA are doing everything they can to employ as many non-whites as possible. Can't have those damn whites taking all the credit for THEIR OWN achievements, can we...
I wonder what on Earth they teach in school today, about the history of science and technology, specifically who invented and discovered almost EVERYTHING. That would be WHITE MEN. I wonder how a teacher in a class of 'third worlders pretending to be Europeans' (you know, Africans claiming to be 'British', Indians claiming to be 'American', etc.) goes about teaching this sort of stuff - all the sub 70 IQ third world kids can see that their races have contributed virtually nothing to the world, yet every day they are told that 'white people are evil', and yet still want to live around us! Ain't we lucky...
I'm sure there are brainwashed idiots on here who will actually claim that an all black NASA could do this. Or even build a rocket. Or a car. LOL.
The kids get interested when the parents are.
My 8 and 5 y.o. LOVE this stuff. So do their friends that I have spent some time teaching to. early NASA was a BIG todo because we had a large number of engineers and scientists in America. Now? We have a bunch of money-grubbing weenies. We put out lawyers who want to sue, and financial idiots that studied at the school of short-term profits. As such, ppl watch films about legal drama and rich ppl, rather than learn how to make things.
You want your kid interested in science and space? Then fucking focus on them and get them into it.
Finally, if we can get the GD neo-cons out of the way, shut down the SLS, restore funding to mars efforts AND to private space esp. wanting to go to the moon, then we will see a lot of interest. Right now, we spend 10's of billions with neo-cons throwing money at their districts, rather than allowing NASA to do the right things.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
BTW, I am with my 5 y.o. son this moment watching 'Mars Rising' on SCI channel while waiting to grab some lunch.
He is asking questions about it and likes this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Big Cheers to NASA, hip hip hooray!
Actually, as I recall from 1969, there was no live TV from the lunar landers (any of them) until the astronauts opened the hatch on the LM and started climbing out; they had to deploy a camera on the outside of the lunar module. This was hours after the actual landing. During the landing itself all we got was audio of the spacecraft communications. Any footage of the landings themselves were from film movie cameras developed after the missions.
There's an awesome picture here taken from the MRO of the parachute deployed. This is breath-taking.
Taken from the twitter feed of a somewhat anthropomorphised representation of Curiosity.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Yes. Good old Mr. Aerosmith.
you guys are concern about NASA hidding Mar's civilizations whille not caring at all about what the Federal Reserve hiddes from us???
funny people...
Unfortunatually it was teenage life, that jacked our rover and is now doing donuts in a nearby crator, as the following disturbing images show. The last shows dominate behavior which the local xenobehaviourist called "teabagging" to our main camera...
Does 'Curiosity' have a microphone which IIRC Carl Sagan had suggested to be put in the NASA Mars rovers to record the sound of martian winds?
After the introduction of OSX, Mac was not really a Mac after all.
Does anyone think it makes sense to go to the moon on our way to Mars? Couldn't we do basically the same thing using the ISS if a stop over is even needed?
have you all been stoned for 15 years???
opportunity?
spirit?
sojourner?
any of those ring a bell?
It appears that times are a changing.
What is needed is for us to push out kids in the right direction.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Great, so you are saying that with all our technological advancement over the last 40 years, we can't stream a low res even black and white image along with the communications stream? It's not as difficult as you claim it is.
I think you are just butthurt that someone is criticizing your precious.
Uhh, who the fuck said anything about "high bandwidth"? I just wanted a little stream of video, which SHOULD IN FACT be much simpler to do than the analog signal they broadcast live so long ago.
1969. 2012. Do you understand the difference?
Now it is well over 24 hours later. Still no video. A delayed video showcasing their new delivery mechanism would have been great. Where is it? I don't know, maybe you and the rest of the nerd rage team can see it as it is shoved far up the ass of the collective NASA project administration.
Also, your claim of no communications is bullshit. There was no breathless moment here. I watched the whole thing. It was continuous communication. I guess maybe they CAN transmit during atmospheric entry, given that the atmosphere is 1/100th as dense as Earth's.
But hey, you don't want to make space travel accessible to the next generation of potential scientists, keep doing what you're doing. Set expectations at the barest of minimums, and yell and scream at anyone who dares to compare current missions with past ones.
"Hurr, u dun't agri wit me kil urself lulz."
Yes, that is one way to get them interested. Introducing it to them in school is another. I became interested in space as a boy with little or no intervention from my parents and it helped to lead me to become a scientist.
I am really holding myself back from flaming you. I guess you forgot about the whole "one small step for man" thing.
To remind you, here is the footage of the decent (actual footage on the left--this is what was shown in school gymnasiums and such): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGROPoLkMQM
And here are the first steps on the moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BEwmTkMCCU
This was all watched live by 1/5th of the world's population: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Cultural_impact
For fucks sake.
Armstrong's steps onto the moon were transmitted live -- I watched it in 1969 along with 1/5 of the rest of the world as you said. He deployed the camera while going down the ladder -- Wiki quote from the Apollo 11 page: "Climbing down the nine-rung ladder, Armstrong pulled a D-ring to deploy the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) folded against Eagle's side and activate the TV camera, and at 02:56 UTC he set his left foot on the surface." The footage from the LM window during landing was not transmitted live -- it was recorded and brought back. We didn't get that live -- that is the point I made in my first reply -- no live video of the landing, only live video Armstrong walking out almost two hours later.
Ah, so you don't know the difference. And here I thought you were trolling.</sarcasm>
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Or, you haven't got a clue. I agree with the facts only. Facts says you are a retard.
Actually, the facts say that my IQ is several sigmas above the mean, and that you are a child who tells people that he disagrees with to go kill themselves.
No, it doesn't. What this discussion shows is that you don't know the difference between "opinion" and "fact". I don't disagree with you. Reality disagrees with you. You have been asking why reality is the way reality is, and that NASA is to blame for the fact that the real world is not to your liking. That is absurd. Bordering on insane. What you are asking NASA to do can not be done because the laws of physics prevents it. You have in essence been blaming NASA for the fact that objects fall down. That is absurd. You have therefore proven beyond any reasonable doubt that you are an ignorant idiot.
Meh, just drop a big rock then follow it in
You forgot to mention that the lander is MOVING during re-entry, with multiple attitude changes. (For OP, that means it turns around different ways.) Even ignoring the "other side of Mars" problem, it would not only require being able to accurately aim a high-gain antenna, but the antenna would have to be physically mounted where it could point at Earth at all times during descent. AT ALL TIMES. And at that distance you have to use directional antennas, which have to be rather precisely aimed at the other end, which doesn't go well with the kind of vibration you get during descent. It just ain't gonna happen.
The problem isn't getting "a little" bandwidth for streaming video, it's getting ANY significant bandwidth beyond simple telemetry. Even audio wants a few kbits/sec. And if you somehow managed to get a 64x64x16-gray postage stamp video into a low bandwidth, it would be useless at such a small size. Most importantly, it wouldn't tell you anything important. Knowing just the few numbers relating to the vehicle status and position updated every second is much more useful and efficient.
And for what it's worth, the lander took a bunch of high-resolution pictures during descent for a stop-motion video. So far they've only uploaded down-sampled versions of a fraction of them. Eventually they'll get them all, but the point is it took a few days before we even got all of the down-sampled series.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }