When this post is 75 minutes old, Curiosity will touch down on Mars
 

Streaming coverage live at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl

Exciting stuff!

Congratulations NASA.

All Systems GO!

FAB

Exciting stuff

Press conference right now on www.nasa.gov/mars

As exciting as watching the early Apollo flights. Do we realize what has been accomlished and in how many different ways this could have gone wrong? Amazing! I was surprised the images were as clear as they were.

good work NASA, JPL.

I remember reading a book by Michael Collins the Apollo Astronaut. In it he was talking about the lift off and pressing the buttons to release the first stage. He said there were close to a million individual components in the first stage, any of which would kill them if it failed at the wrong time and the sense of relief felt as the stage fell away.

At that point there were a million less things to worry about, and only five million other things left. :)

Agree 100%. The "sky-crane" concept is as novel as it is ambitious, and I felt a lot of tension as it was coming down. With the airbag landings they used for Spirit and Opportunity, it was sort of assumed that unless the bags failed to inflate it was pretty much impossible for the mission to fail once it got on-target for the landing zone.

With the Sky Crane it seemed that things could so easily go awry at each stage.

If anyone can do this, it's NASA. Proving again they're the cream of the crop.

I hope I live to see a manned mission to Mars.

As amazing as that is (and it is), what always filled my mind with awe was the recoupling of the lunar lander with the command module. I've heard it described as a slingshot hurtling two men in a craft toward another craft in hopes that they'd meet. Now it might not be 100% accurate, but if the two parts in reality missed each other, would there be enough power to realign another docking? (I'd hope so, but I've never heard if there was enough boost for another go 'round) The margin for error boggles the mind. Some mighty big stones. Mighty big.


Can't wait for some video.

what annoys me is that this will be swallowed by the other gossip news soon :(

Congrats Nasa. Amazing that such a complex operation have worked out well so far.
But the amount of effort we put in to finding life and a new livable planet compared to the effort we put in to destroying and mistreating the only one we have is also puzzling to say the least.
Viking

Even when the craft was ~ 1 km high, it was traveling 5.4 - 5.9 kms per second (obviously travel was more horizontal). It's amazing that in that time/space it had a controlled descent, slowed down to a managable speed and then was able to use the sky crane.

Every time the techs breathed a sigh of relief after each check point I gulped air too.

i wonder:

the moon cant be terraformed for not being able to retain an atmosphere

but mars seem quite likely a future home

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqYHK8CeKzU

We have the tech to set up a Mars outpost right now, we would just have to send supplies indefinitely and currently have no way of bringing them home if they change their mind.

I read Steve Squyres (lead scientist on the Spirit and Opportunity rover mission) book and they didn't have too much faith in the big-bags method of getting the payload onto Mars. I think this is their answer to get something this big and heavy safely down and in working order.
Fingers crossed so far!

For all the slagging NASA gets they certainly are unrivalled. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers had an expected working life of something like 60 days but incredibly eight years after landing on Mars Opportunity rover is still going!!!

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/missi...tunityAll.html