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

[Robert]

Originally Posted by CaptainDoggles

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.

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.

[raaaid]

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

[WTE_Galway]

Originally Posted by raaaid

i wonder:

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

but mars seem quite likely a future home

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.

[arthursmedley]

Originally Posted by CaptainDoggles

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.

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