Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Sunday, August 05, 2012

  Wheels down on mars!

After all these years I can hardly stand to sit through the last stages of a landing - everything has already happened, all you can wait for is news of success... or await the silence and questions that followed for months on all the unsuccessful missions, like the mars polar lander, and Beagle2...

This time tho, the cheers rang out, in mission control, with the 600+ people in the theaters here tonight, and no doubt on web streams and television rooms throughout the globe, after the mission controller cried out:

"We are safe on mars!

... We continue to recieve telemetry from mars. We're safe."

I've had this song running through my head all night.

and...

"We've got wheels down on mars!"

 

  Tracking the landing of Curiosity, from Seattle

Shortly after arriving in Seattle, I discovered Ray Ramadorai had mailed me a link to the live mars curiosity landing event being put on at the museum of flight tonight...

My cousin Aaron and I took one look at each other, unloaded the dogs, and boogied over there.

The theater was full when we arrived. The overflow theater had overflowed, too. And the air conditioning had failed. The audience sat rapt as the engineers and scientists explained each subsystem, each design, each instrument...

As I write, the main entrance to the theater is now full, and they've just added a second monitor for the rest of the crowd that keeps flowing in, and in, and in.

I remember in the time from one presentation to the next, Curiosity moved 8,000 km closer to Mars, 28k away, about 20 minutes ago, as best as I can remember... maybe it was during the 7 minutes of terror?

The time continues to fly by. Landing in less than 70 minutes! There's people here with their babies, guys with their girlfriends, girls with their guyfriends, NASA employees, members of alt.space, Aerojet, Planetary Resources, MPL, name it, and they all sit with eyes aglow in anticipation and hope...

##curiosity is an irc chat channel on freenode dedicated to the event.

And they are about to switch over to the NASA tv feed, on the big screen, in high def.

Chris Lewicki is up now, describing the comms systems.

 
David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.


Resume,Songs,
My new blog, NeX-6, My facebook page
Orgs I like
The EFF - keeping free speech in the world
Musical stuff I like
Jeff, Rick, Ardour, Jack
Prior Rants - Sharing your home network better in a time of covi... Designing for the disconnect Email lists going down the memory hole Instituting saner, professional source code manage... Wireless and Wifi in 2015 - not what I dreamed of Saving wifi! Fixing Bufferbloat! Fighting the vend... Virgin Media - Fixing the epidemic of bufferbloat ... 49... and trying to find my navel Wheels down on mars! Tracking the landing of Curiosity, from Seattle
Best of the blog:
Uncle Bill's Helicopter - A speech I gave to ITT Tech - Chicken soup for engineers
Beating the Brand - A pathological exploration of how branding makes it hard to think straight
Inside the Internet Mind - trying to map the weather within the global supercomputer that consists of humans and google
Sex In Politics - If politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it, it would be a better world
Getting resources from space - An alternative to blowing money on mars using NEAs.
On the Columbia - Why I care about space
Authors I like:
Doc Searls
Where's Cherie?
UrbanAgora
Jerry Pournelle
The Cubic Dog
Evan Hunt
The Bay Area is talking
Brizzled
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Unlocking The Air
Bob Mage
BroadBand & Me
SpaceCraft
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Callahans
Pajamas Media BlogRoll Member

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