UPDATE: Touchdown confirmed! Congratulations NASA JPL! First image received. See below.
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I thought I”d take a minute to advise you that some real science and engineering that will be see from NASA tonight rather than the politically motivated science from scientist turned arrested activist Dr. James Hansen in the latest NASA GISS claim distributed via AP’s compliant repeater, Seth Borenstein. On the plus side, Seth at least gave a voice to the other side.
Readers may recall I photographed and wrote about the Curiosity exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum last year:
Experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL ) share the challenges of Curiosity’s rover final 7 minutes to landing on the surface of Mars on the 5th of August,2012 ( 10:31 US Pacific time) . Watch the video below, well worth your time.
Curiosity is a Mars rover launched by NASA on November 26, 2011. Currently en route to the planet, it is scheduled to land in Gale Crater on August 5, 2012 ( US Pacific time) . The rover’s objectives include searching for past or present life, studying the Martian climate, studying Martian geology, and collecting data for a future manned mission to Mars. It will explore Mars for 2 years.
Curiosity’s landing Times in regarding time travel zones:
Aug 5, 2012 10:31 p.m. US Pacific
Aug 6, 2012 1:31 a.m. US Eastern
Aug 6, 2012 3:31 p.m. Hobart – Australia
Aug 6, 2012 5:31 a.m Universal (UTC)
Curiosity cost: A cool US$2.5 billion
Cool stuff Bonus (Mars Science Laboratory) such as interactive experiences can be found in:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/
NASA official site:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html
NASA-TV coverage starts two hours before landing. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html (h/t to Ric Werme)
UPDATE: Touchdown confirmed! Congratulations NASA! First image received. Will post as soon as I have something to show you.
UPDATE2 self explanatory
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P.S.
It’s ‘confident’. There is a word ‘confidante’, but that’s a person. Duh-dum!
The worst part of the NASA coverage and event was the occasional prolonged interview of/commentary from Holdren, Obama’s Eugenics Advisor. What a puffed-up repulsive putz!
Ugh. The main spokesperson on TV thru the whole event was Asian.
And it’s “gaffe”, unless you’re landing fish.
“L”
I heard one engineer apologizing for being so conservative in his fuel estimates and safety margins to another. There were over 130 out of 300+ kg. remaining, I think he said, when the descent stage cut loose and took off a few kms away to crash. That may have cost payload!
Very clear at 2:56. “Fuk Li”
You post some weird stuff from time to time … but just what bios are supposed to be doing the degrading on Mars? Actually, they go to great lengths to try to exclude every single microbe from the probes to avoid “contaminating” the planet. After all, signs of ‘crobes are the main target of investigation. No point in “salting the mine” to fool yourself!
Mosher gave me a heap of abuse upthread for suggesting that testing might improve the odds of success of a landing on another planet, saying testing was pretty useless because the Martian conditions were so different, and the Martian atmosphere was so much thinner than the Earth’s:
So I was greatly amused today to find the following headline regarding the in-atmosphere testing of NASA’s lunar lander:
I guess NASA didn’t get the Mosher memo about the futility of testing landers in the Earth’s atmosphere if they are going to be used in a thinner atmosphere, or even in a vacuum …
w.