How to bring a 3.3 tonne laboratory from 21,240km/h to zero in 7 minutes...

Here is one for the conspiracy theorists ...
Most of the team that you could see were using MAC laptops - but now in the news conference, the screen saver came on and it was Windows!!

 

I mean life wise. If ET walked across the screen do you think they would let it out.

 

Yes. They would. It would be the most amazing discovery ever.

 

Anyone got links to footage of the landing?

The NASA live servers have 56,000+ people viewing and it's ground to a halt.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/
http://news.discovery.com/space/live-mars-rover-curiosity-landing-120802.html



- Ernie.

 

+1.

Besides, I saw at least a dozen people smashing away on their phones in the centre, it would be on twitter or something in an instant if anyone saw it.

 

It's the entire point of the rover in the first place.

 

Are there any recordings of events as they transpired? I missed out due to work.

 

So much jingoism & patriotic circlejerking in the live feed. "Only 'MERIKKA could do this. Also there were some international hangers on to thank, but I wont name them"

 

We would have known a long while ago if ET walked across the screen... what they're looking for is microbial, if not at least conditions that it could exist.

 

Yeah, it's kind of like the speeches after a federal election.


- Ernie.

 

Sorry, but they deserve it. And they're right, at least so far, it's the most advanced rover ever sent to another planet. They (NASA/USA) has earnt any self congratulations. Only Russia comes close in space achievement, and they haven't done much of anything lately.

 

Hasnt every one else failed when trying to put a rover on the planet?

 

Yup, the failure rate is huge. 40 missions, on 15 succeeded.

India is sending a Mars mission in 2013. Just an orbiter though.



- Ernie.

 

I was amazed how good the feed was - considering how many hits that would have been getting, I was crystal.

Now when do I get a turn at the controls?

 

They better get that power sorted first...

 

Russia has not had much success with Mars, they had pretty good success with Venus. I don't think Russia ever successfully landed anything on the planet.They put several probes in orbit.

Russia I believe are the only ones who have successfully landed on Venus. Which has its own challenges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2 of course also failed.


This is one massive landing. 900kg rover with top of the line scientific equipment, powered by a nuclear decay. The amount of science to come out of this thing should be huge. We may finally get answers to questions like:
* Where is all the water
* Can liquid something (water with antifreeze?) still form on or underneath the surface
* Is there any biological life on the surface or just under it.
* Has there been any life on Mars previously.
* Fossils?
* What the hell happens at night (previous rovers were solar powered and apart from basic temperature pressure readings we don't know much about it)
* Planet chemistry

The offical stated goals are:

 

+2, I'm amazed and to think of the amount of engineering that would of went into that is mind boggling.. Now for science to be done .

Anyone know if there's a downloadable version of the feed? Missed out watching everything unfold at work.

 

The first pictures I take are not from the main camera?? given my iphone is less blurry/low res

Actually what sort of bandwidth do they get sending data back to earth?

 

The first picture was just an "It worked!" moment. Taken from the rear obstacle camera, normally used only for obstacle avoidance.

I read 56kbps somewhere.

 

I took note of this too. When the camera was focused on the laptop screens you could actually tell it was OSX. Even for the announcement of the Higgs Boson, many of the scientists at conference were using Mac.

It seems not only artists but also scientists love Mac laptops.

I'm sure most of the monitoring systems or any systems these guys use are Linux/Unix, so makes sense to just use a nix based system on your lappy.