Countdown to curiosity.

Vertigo

Vertigo

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Well, curiosity is due to make it's remarkable landing attempt on Monday 6th 6:30 am British Summer Time.

If successful this will be the most incredible extraterrestial landings ever undertaken. At 900kg the Curiosity is just shy of a metric tonne; that's a serious amount of weight to land purely autonomously. Instructions from Earth take around 14 minutes I think, which is a rather slow reaction time for dodging any abysses she's about to land in.

I think I might even get up early to watch this live on the NASA feed.
 
If only the BBC could be persuaded that the landing has something to do with the Olympics, you'd have a number of channels from which to choose rather than a NASA feed.
 
The landing is called The 7 Minutes of Terror! Because once the lander's message reaches Earth that the descent is in progress, it will take 7 minutes before we find out if it crashed and burned, or landed successfully.

My nerves couldn't handle that! LOL. I'll wake up later in the morning (it will be landing roughly 5:30 a.m. here on the U.S. eastern seaboard) and find out which way it went!
 
GN I think you might have that wrong, all the sites I have seen (including NASA) give the time as 05:31 GMT. One site said:

Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on Mars at Gale Crater on Monday, August 6, 2012 at 05:31 Universal Time. Here in the United States that’s 10:31 PM Pacific Time on Sunday, August 5, or 12:31 AM Central Time and 1:31 AM Eastern Time on Monday morning August 6. Coverage will begin a few hours before, including a special on the Discovery Channel which is currently promoting a partially screwed up date.
Click to expand...

Agree on the 7 minutes of terror. I watched a BBC Horizon documentary on the whole mission so far and whilst it wasn't the best documentary the Horizon team have ever made the content was fascinating and they did give a feel for how helpless they will be during that time.
 
Vertigo said:
I watched a BBC Horizon documentary on the whole mission so far and whilst it wasn't the best documentary the Horizon team have ever made the content was fascinating and they did give a feel for how helpless they will be during that time.
Click to expand...

I watched that as well, a nice intro to the mission, I thought. I really hope the mission is successful...
 
It's a robot.

Would anyone prefer a live pilot setting down with a big spacecraft for the first time? In a way that's already been done with the Apollo missions, which could have "crashed" merely by setting down at a tilt because of a boulder. After Curiosity there will be other "big" missions, all adding to the experience of setting down spacecraft far from auto club assistance, experience that will make the first manned missions to Mars and elsewhere a little less stressful.

from the movie SHORT CIRCUIT:

"It's a machine. It doesn't get scared. It doesn't get happy. It doesn't get sad. It just runs programs."
 
Not sure what your point is. It's not the machine. I'm talking about the people here on earth waiting in excruciating suspense whether or not the landing went as planned.
 
Yeah the really scary part is when they were interviewing people involved in the mission, they were talking about how long they spend working on one mission - it can be several decades - and over a career you are only likely to work on maybe two to four different missions. To have one crash and burn would be devastating for these people. I would be terrified myself!
 
It's 0830 for me, which is fine. I'll even put the TV on, just in case one of the news channels has footage (doubtful, but I live in hope ;)).
 
Vertigo said:
I would be terrified myself!
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Terrified? Seriously? Disappointment I can understand, but if a mission left the pad safely—where most failures occur—anyone terrified by the landing sequence is in the wrong business.

Lots of robotic missions have failed. (A few manned ones, too.) Yet the world rolled on. It's those failures that make any human endeavor worthwhile.

"But I'm surprised at you, Doc," he went on. "You're afraid to take the responsibility for us, aren't you? That's the size of it?"

"Yes, Ross, that's the size of it."

"Yet you were willing to take the responsibility of leading us on a trip to the moon. That's more dangerous than anything that could happen here, isn't it? Isn't it?"

Cargraves bit his lip. "It's different."

"I'll tell you how it's different. If we get killed trying to make the jump, ninety-nine chances out of a hundred we all get killed together. You don't have to go back and explain anything to our parents. That's how it's different!"

"Now, Ross!"

"Don't `Now, Ross' me. What the deuce, Doc?" he went on bitterly. "Suppose it had happened on the moon; would you be twittering around, your morale all shot? Doc, I'm surprised at you. If you are going to have an attack of nerves every time the going gets a little tough, I vote for Morrie for permanent captain."

—ROCKET SHIP GALILEO by Robert Heinlein
Click to expand...

Maybe these mission planners are "terrified" because then they'd be around to deal with failure. Welcome to the human race.
 
You have to consider the possibility that not all seven billion of us react the same way to events, Metryq. Otherwise we might as well be robots.
 
Also most of our failures might only trash a few days or months work. It's rare for most of us that the failure of a single operation will trash years or even decades of work. I would find such a thing utterly sould destorying, and the prospect of it, yes, terrifying. On the other hand success for them would bring so much satisfaction/fulfillment. So I would say the stakes are mega high for these people in either direction.

The leader of the team put it quite nicely. He gets away from the stress by surfing. And he remarked that one little mistake surfing created an embarrassing wipeout, one little mistake in space and it would be the end of that particular game.
 
Not long now. :eek:

Apparently the on board plutonium generator could keep Curiosity going for up to 14 years.

Please, please let this thing get down in one piece. :)
 
Watched the scenes from Mission Control on CNN - they went nuts as they got confirmation of landing. :D Presently looking at first pictures on the NASA site.

It shows what can be done if people put their minds to it. :)
 
And they're down, receiving data, and have the first image in.

Awesome, it worked! I'm staggered and so impressed with these people. My congratulations to them all. :D:D
 
You can follow the Curiosity Rover on twitter :)

@MarsCuriosity

Not sure if it is really tweeting on its own, but it should give you regular updates and the latest info on what is happening.
 
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