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.

Comments

Streaming video

[adolf]

The best-quality streaming video of the event from JPL that I've found is over at Ustream.

FYI, FWIW, HTH.

Re:Streaming video

[Microlith]

They did. This stream was pure comms and nothing else. I kept the annoying PR stream open in another tab but muted.

Re:Streaming video

[icebike]

If you read your own link, you will see that nobody but the Russians even tried to land, and one of
their landers (Mars 3, 1971) lasted 20 seconds after touch down (or was it a crash, nobody is quite sure).
Mars 6 transmitted data on descent, but was never heard from again.

Russian Venus missions landed and transmitted imagess.

So, no, the US is not the only country to put a lander on another planet.

However the US is the only country to put a lander on Mars that survived more than a few seconds.

And the only country with operational experience on another planet beyond simply receiving a few hurried photos prior to
vehicle failure. It should be pointed out that Germany, France, Russia, and a couple others collaborated on the Curiosity lander.

Re:Streaming video

[MichaelSmith]

Russia put a number of successful landers on Venus.

FFS...

[Guppy06]

It's scheduled to land at 1:31 AM EST

EDT!

TOUCHDOWN

[WindBourne]

Curiosity is ON THE SURFACE.

Re:Landing will never work

[txoof]

AFRAID NOT! Touchdown Confirmed!!

Re:Steering

[Quiet_Desperation]

Yeah, I think JPL is up to speed on that.

Re:incremental cost of another one?

[WindBourne]

Zero chance. It comes down to the nuke power supply. We no longer have the Pu-238 for another mission. Sadly, CONgress is busy fighting about it. The dems want to allocate the DOE to allocate the 100 M for it, while the republicans want NASA to pay the 100 M for it.