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Curiosity Lands On Mars Tonight!


arfink

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The Mars Curiosity rover will land on Mars tonight around 1:31 EDT. NASA's mission is fairly daring, because they are landing a really large rover out there with no possibility of human intervention. It takes 7 minutes just to get a data packet from Earth to Mars, so the computers have to execute this ridiculous Rube-goldberg-esque landing sequence that involves a first stage lander with a winch thing they call the "sky crane," multiple parachutes, and thrusters.

It'll be insanely razzle dazzle if they pull it off.

Anybody game for staying up late to see if it all goes wham-splat?

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Here is NASA's news brief, BTW:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/jul/HQ12-257_MSL_Times_Square.html

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TheresaThoma

Well due to the number of people who will be watching it I think I will wait until morning to hear if it makes it or not.

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Well, Trisha and I watched this. Fun times!

Curiosity made it, and by sheer luck and good timing they managed to get one picture back before the rotation of Mars took the whole thing outside of radio lock.

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-1f_pyihgSVE/UB9YppK2NfI/AAAAAAAAR4o/chanUNtJxjo/s440/wheel.jpg[/img]

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Just looked at some pics of the rover pre-launch almost a year ago, and it's hard to believe how huge this thing is.

We haven't landed something this big on another celestial body since the moon landings. It's the size of a car!

[img]http://boingboing.net/img/1240665839_ECz75-XL-1.jpg[/img]

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xTrishaxLynnx

It was pretty hilarious that its own wheel happened to be its first picture.

Edited by xTrishaxLynnx
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[quote name='CatherineM' timestamp='1344208995' post='2463148']
If the atmosphere there weren't so thin, it would be easier to land stuff.
[/quote]

Well yeah, the parachute, while huge, was only able to slow the lander down from 5.9 kilometres per [i]second[/i] to maybe 4 kilometres per second. All the parachute did was kill the horizontal drift, it did almost nothing to slow the descent. They had to do the whole thing on thrusters, just like the moon.

Edited by arfink
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