Phoenix Mars Lander To Touch Down In 2 Hours 119
AFP has a good summary of the pre-touchdown jitters the Phoenix Mars Lander crew is living through. The spacecraft has been under way for 10 months. If the landing goes according to plan — and only about half of the three dozen such attempts have — mission controllers at the University of Arizona will receive radio signals from the Martian surface at 23:53 GMT. Here's the Mars mission home. You can (in theory) track the lander here, but at the moment the JPL Solar System Simulator is "experiencing technical difficulties."
A better link for full JPL/Phoenix coverage (Score:5, Informative)
Best place to go for coverage including links to NASA TV (live video starts at 3:30pm PDT is... http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/phoenix [nasa.gov].
Wish us luck!
Thing to note (Score:5, Informative)
Here's to hoping we learn something about Mars again. If not, as always, we need to keep trying. If it weren't for these people, things we take for granted in daily life wouldn't exist.
Watch (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Buddy's Idea (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thing to note (Score:4, Informative)
The vast majority of US *landing* attempts have been successful. In fact, only the Mars Polar Lander failed. That's one. And this craft has been heavily tested to avoid the same fate (because its using similar technology as the Polar Lander).
NASA TV link... (Score:4, Informative)
Direct Links to NASA TV (Score:5, Informative)
I ran into problems getting the NASA TV streams to work under Firefox in Linux. Here are the direct links if you're in the same boat or don't want to go through javascript infested pages. I only tested the Windows Media one.
Windows Media [nasa.gov]
Real Media [nasa.gov]
Quicktime [nasa.gov]
Re:Buddy's Idea (Score:5, Informative)
TCP Extensions for Space Communications [psu.edu]
TCP/IP Router for Space Applications [nasa.gov]
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
MUCH Better bandwidth (TV quality streaming) (Score:4, Informative)
This one is at much higher bandwidth.
http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1368163 [yahoo.com]
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Informative)
Landing successful (Score:5, Informative)
(Yeah, I know, 15min ago, gimme some lag
Re:Huzzah (Score:4, Informative)
Let's see if the prediction that there will be big polygonal "tiles" on the surface holds out (based on orbiter photos). It will look like a giant bathroom tile floor with dust and crap if so...
Landed almost perfectly flat (Score:3, Informative)
with a tilt of a quarter of a degree!
This is as close to perfection as it could possibly get.
Re:Thing to note (Score:2, Informative)