Curiosity Lands On Mars 411
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.
Re:Slashdot - Multi-Posted Articles for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
As many as it takes until we know what happens to this awesome nuclear powered rover with frikin lasers on another frikin planet!
Re:Landing will never work (Score:5, Insightful)
Suck it, jackass.
First image... Is that... The Death Star? (Score:4, Insightful)
Congradulation NASA! I hope they increase your funding and reduce funding for wars.
Re:Landing will never work (Score:5, Insightful)
Surprise, surprise, actual scientists and engineers are better than you at this stuff.
Fucking amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot - Multi-Posted Articles for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Excellent! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fails Compared to the Moon Landing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Best place to catch up on the arrival (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Streaming video (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of commentators, is anyone else annoyed at the NASA commentator?
They were giving the location of the landing and she cut in blabbing about something in the middle of them saying how far off their initial expected landing point was. I think they were saying it was just a couple meters which is outstanding considering the distance involved and the ability or chances to stray slightly in the process.
I mean I'm watching the NASA feed in order to hear all the details. If I cared about someone's comments, I would wait until some news agency did a write up on it. They should have shut the hell up while they were reading the results of the different stages off.
Same feeling (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Slashdot - Multi-Posted Articles for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Streaming video (Score:4, Insightful)
A video stream of just showing the main room and the audio from it would have been great. Having her cut in during the interesting parts was seriously annoying. They should have had two streams.
Re:Slashdot - Multi-Posted Articles for Nerds (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First image... Is that... The Death Star? (Score:3, Insightful)
Congradulation NASA! I hope they increase your funding and reduce funding for wars.
Actually, I don't mind that we fund efforts - including military ones, if needed - to combat and push back against the most violent and dangerous aspects of a culture that would stone to death the women you saw working at JPL's flight control center tonight. You know, because Allah hates them for having learned how to read and show their hair, among other death-worthy sins.
Re:Curiosity is on Mars! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First image... Is that... The Death Star? (Score:0, Insightful)
Go watch Collateral Murder on youtube, then come back and say this shit.
Carl Sagan would be proud! (Score:5, Insightful)
“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!
Re:MOAR Mars Rovers FTW!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:First image... Is that... The Death Star? (Score:3, Insightful)
But that isn't what has happened, is it? Iraq was a secular society under Saddam, and is now more Islamic than it was before 2003 and womens rights are under threat. Meanwhile Afghanistan is set to fall to the Taliban as soon as the US and allies leave.
If the US wants to improve the lot of women then it should fund women's education and birth control in these countries, not bomb them to shit.
Re:MOAR Mars Rovers FTW!!1 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:First image... Is that... The Death Star? (Score:0, Insightful)
Why? The two things (the grandparent's posting and the video you suggest) have precisely nothing to do with each other. That the US occasionally accidentally fucks up (and shamefully attempts to cover it up) does not change the facts that the culture in question has a deliberate policy as described by the grandparent. Only a deluded fool would believe that because someone accidentally runs over a child, that 'proves' the Green River Killer wasn't such a bad guy.
Re:Tune in to Coast to Coast AM (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MOAR Mars Rovers FTW!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Curiosity is on Mars! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Curiosity is on Mars! (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the reasoning for that: From the point of view of the people controlling their budget, NASA's raison-d'etre is public relations for the United States. That science stuff is just a concession to all those eggheads who want to actually learn about stuff.
Re:Tune in to Coast to Coast AM (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Curiosity is on Mars! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hope so too. But still, there is nothing more nauseating than American Nationalism oozing out of every statement on the mission success. It's worse than the Chinese - and that takes some doing.
Listen, America has done plenty of things that we should be ashamed of. When you're blindly supporting the country through things like unjust wars and human rights abuses, that's nationalism. But sometimes the country does something genuinely right, something true to the values of the nation. Like the guys at NASA did tonight. I think we've earned the right to take a brief break from worrying about how screwed up things are with the country economically, politically, and militarily, and feel a little pride about doing something something that's genuinely amazing. So please f*** off.
Re:MOAR Mars Rovers FTW!!1 (Score:4, Insightful)
All these worlds are yours except Europa.
Attempt no landing there.
Re:Curiosity is on Mars! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, why not view it as stimulus money. After all, it all gets spent on Earth, and almost all in the USA.