Phoenix Mars Lander To Touch Down In 2 Hours

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."

Re:oh sure

[LostCluster]

The site was slashdotted well before the story was posted for subscribers... nice try JPL, but you'll have to do more to get through a Memorial Day Weekend slashdotting.

Re:A better link for full JPL/Phoenix coverage

[Danathar]

yea, and their streaming video pretty much sucks. In a world where braodband has been around for 10 years NASA TV on the Web is Marginal quality on Windows Media only, or crappy low bandwidth with everything else (they don't even use H.264 for quicktime which is a super small bandwidth link).

Hell, they COULD provide a high-def multicast feed to Internet2 since they peer with it and don't (you would think that researchers and universities would be interested).

How hard is it to multicast a feed to I2? I could to it with cheap equipment in under a half hour. Scaling? Use Source Specific Multicast.

Sorry for the rant, but if you have VLC and are connected to I2 watch what is being broadcast via SAP announcements. The Europeans have been multicasting hi-def content (boring legislature sessions) for YEARS yet NASA is clueless.