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Mars Curiosity Rover Landing 8-6-12


Jst2fst

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For those of you interested in less that 12 hours the mars rover curiosity will touchdown on the mars surface. I plan on watching the discovery channel for their landing tomorrow night at 10PM e/p times. I hope all goes well as planned ending its eight month trip at over 350 million miles.

Just some information this rover is about the size of a mini cooper powered by a nuclear reactor weighing close to 2000 lbs.

Edit: for some reason I can;t embed videos into this thread sorry :confused:.

Here is a more detailed fact sheet in a pdf:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sheets/mars-science-laboratory.pdf

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

Video:

<iframe id="dit-video-embed" width="640" height="360" src="http://static.discoverymedia.com/videos/components/sci/daef92509f51f1c1a9406b1b8687ec984263987c/snag-it-player.html?auto=no" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>

http://science.discovery.com/videos/mars-landing-2012-sneak-peek.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nttnecwEku8

Edited by Jst2fst
Added videos hopefully....
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I cannot wait,being the science nut that I am it excites me that we are going to get a more in depth look at the red planet. Carl Sagan would be proud.

I've been watching this off and on for the past few months. This is something that has always caught my interest.

I'm sure there will be a delay so they can coverup any alien stuff. :)

Yea, it takes 14 minutes for the radio signals get back to earth alone so will see what happens.:D

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Watched the landing last night. I know it sounds cheesy to say this but it feels like the moon landing of my generation,the kids and I made a night of it glued to the TV and the live stream the whole time. I have always been a major supporter of science and discovery and it brings great joy to see my children taking an interest in it as well.

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I watched it live (look at my post time! :D) Pretty amazing to listen in to the engineers as they discussed the phases of the landing as it happened (or as the radio signals arrived, more accurately...)

"Tango Delta Nominal" was the report that we were waiting for.

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yeah I actually had to take a General Purpose day at work I stayed up way too late to go in and run a counter balance lift at work for 12hrs lol. I just find it amazing that NASA can still do all of this on 0.5% of the US Budget. Imagine what they can do with a full 1%. Can't wait to see the High Res pictures and Videos start to come in.

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yeah I actually had to take a General Purpose day at work I stayed up way too late to go in and run a counter balance lift at work for 12hrs lol. I just find it amazing that NASA can still do all of this on 0.5% of the US Budget. Imagine what they can do with a full 1%. Can't wait to see the High Res pictures and Videos start to come in.

I missed it last night had to be up at 5am for work :( and yes its pretty cool what NASA can do wit so little monies imagine if I had those kinds of funds ;)..

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I missed it last night had to be up at 5am for work :( and yes its pretty cool what NASA can do wit so little monies imagine if I had those kinds of funds ;)..

Imagine how much of the US debt we could pay off with just 5 years of those funds! Yes it is cool Nasa does these sorts of things but it would be cooler if they could market some of those discoveries and information to other freeloading countries. After all China isn't sharing their information from the comet landing with anyone for free.;)

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I stayed up to watch. Absolutely amazing. Takes a special group of people to come up with that crazy EDL method, hammer out the math and have faith that it might actually work.

Kinda pissed they cut away from that post-EDL poll... I heard landing velocity ~0.6m/s, final attitude relative to gravity ~4deg, then distance from target ~200... I assume meters? Anybody finds any of that info post it up - the internet news is nothing but a bunch of media robots copy-pasting the same lame press-release bullshit.

On a side note I joked about a GoPro in the other thread - I read on some chinese website (yeah, I was trying to go outside the US for intelligent reporting) that there was a video camera activated as soon as the heat shield was shed to capture the landing event. Hope we get to see that.

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