Curiosity? Nasa?! MARTIANS!!

[Bells]

Curiosity Closes in on its New 'Home'
Sat, 04 Aug 2012 08:20:24 PM GMT-0300

With Mars looming ever larger in front of it, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft and its Curiosity rover are in the final stages of preparing for entry, descent and landing on the Red Planet at 10:31 p.m. PDT Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6). Curiosity remains in good health with all systems operating as expected. Today, the flight team uplinked and confirmed commands to make minor corrections to the spacecraft's navigation reference point parameters. This afternoon, as part of the onboard sequence of autonomous activities leading to the landing, catalyst bed heaters are being turned on to prepare the eight Mars Lander Engines that are part of MSL's descent propulsion system. As of 2:25 p.m. PDT (5:25 p.m. EDT), MSL was approximately 261,000 miles (420,039 kilometers) from Mars, closing in at a little more than 8,000 mph (about 3,600 meters per second).

I love how Nasa calls the final landing procedure the "7 Minutes of Terror"


So yeah! pretty exciting stuff, the best we have right now is about to land on mars and on the upcoming months we could learn a lot about nothing or nothing about a lot!

As of this post we're 3 hours away from the landing and about a first a week away from the first results, this is somewhat akin of landing on the moon actually, which is pretty cool. Except is not (yet) putting people up there.

But hey, maybe in our lifetime?

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Bells

As of this post we're 3 hours away from the landing

Four, sir.

I may or may not stay up and watch, depending on how the beer holds out. I'll be watching it here, on NASA's website. Pregame apparently begins at 11:30pm EDT, or 0330GMT, or an hour-and-a-half after this post righ'chere, whichever is easiest to understand.

[Bells]

i don't know if people will be around, but that's totally something we could put a chat up for

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Would be pretty cool to see Mars up close. X3

[Aerozord]

I just want to know if these will be color images.

Originally Posted by Bells

But hey, maybe in our lifetime?

I doubt we will ever go to mars. There is no profit in it (or atleast not enough to justify the risk) and those of us that feel "SCREW THAT ITS MARS" dont have that kind of money.

[Flarecobra]

http://news.yahoo.com/abc-news-live-...-20120309.html They're streaming the landing.

And I do beleve we will go to Mars. With it's smaller gravity, it can be a great place for manufacture.

[Doc ock rokc]

Welp Lets just see where Curiosity will take us.

[Flarecobra]

And a textbook landing.

[Bells]

TOUCHDOWN!!!

We have landing, and a 50 billion RC card on Mars, Way to go NASA! This is awesome.

[phil_]

Thirding that we've totally given the Martians a functioning nuclear reactor. Footage of the decent should be online tomorrow. Kinda annoyed that my link ended up being useless; luckily there are bloggers on the inside.