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!"
¶ 10:44 PM 0 comments
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.
¶ 9:14 PM 1 comments
