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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.
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
Suck it, jackass.
Surprise, surprise, actual scientists and engineers are better than you at this stuff.
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.
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; }
That simulation is very cool. Would be even better if it actually showed units the JPL folks are using instead of miles.
Anybody want a peanut?
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...
Since I'm from Europe I'd like to add: Kudos to the people of the US for funding it!
“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!
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.
We just landed a giant robot the size of a car in a manner that we'd expect from a james bond movie. The type of computers nasa uses shouldn't even register on the scale of how fuggin awesome this mission is.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
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.
If I were a civilized Martian, I'd be hiding from us.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz