45 min left for entry. Then 7 min of deceleration to... 0, but hopefully not just any way to 0 , with 1 sec to go speed less than 5m/s and higher than 0 is the preferred method lol.


I wonder if this is the most advanced AI machine we have yet?

was going to go to bed early but now i'm watching the NASA channel and waiting, very cool i watched a short video that illustrated how they are going about landing it and the process was pretty amazing

Watching!

Thanks for the link!!

They showed a screen of data a few min ago but only briefly and it had it at 5.5km/sec with 2 min to entry(atmosphere) (then 7 more). If they report it as they get the signals from it it has already landed in the sense of not being anymore able to causally affect it. It was at 300km altitude.

Pictures soon all ok it seems all landing stages as predicted.

touchdown confirmed!

I'm surprised how little love this thread got.. Anyway - looking forward to the pics over the coming days.

Its a sunny day in Mars, lol!

Speed of Light. That's why everything is automated. We can't control it in real time because its so far away (several minutes even by the speed of light). By comparison, I think the sun is something like 8 or 9 "light minutes" away.

Mars is farther than the sun, about 14 light minutes or 154 million miles compared to 8 light minutes or 93 million miles for the sun.

In b4 discovery of life starts an alien invasion.

The way they described it it looked like a very smooth landing with very small speed. Lets see now if everything is ok and it can start functioning as designed.


Which now bring this question to our society!!! (and sorry for the tangent)

What on earth are the corporations doing when this mission cost only 2.5 bil and a typical top SP500 US company makes more than that per quarter? All it takes is a joint project by 10 of them. It would stimulate all kinds of technological research anyway with many applications. (including how to protect from heat and cold in the moon that is more extreme than on Mars).

You see i have no way to understand even from a cold hearted capitalistic viewpoint why sending a top of the line rover on the Moon (yes just our neighborhood) for less than 1-2 bil probably with the supertop HD technology in imaging and video etc and have it basically broadcast 24/7 from the Moon as it is traveling around in a TV channel that people would have fun looking at and familiarize with the landscape instead of all kinds of bs reality TV garbage they serve out there. What is more REALITY than that?

Of course it has been done 40 years ago by the US and Russia but never live for people and never in great definition, so today it would be amazing with all the Mars technology developed and it would be very easy to operate at such close distance unlike Mars and basically the quality of images sent and video could be much much better than the Mars mission due to much better conditions for sending and receiving signals.

I would love to have a TV channel i could watch a giant blue Earth rise with a nearby huge grey rock as we see the rover slowly moving in real time.

Why on earth is the private sector so stupid to not be all over such a simple project that could fund itself from ads alone and subscriptions for only cents per month as an extra channel.The rover could do all kind of science like the Mars ones and deliver also reality TV program like nothing else. They could say even run TV games to award driver time to students/teenagers, avg people.

Where the hell are the Hollywood morons? Proceeds from such video feeds could then fund all kinds of future missions and assist NASA and the others while bringing moon so much closer to each home on earth.

It all depends on what time of the year / which year it is. 154 million miles sounds like the point at which Mars/Earth are at its furthest distance.