Landing on Mars: seven minutes of terror

[JontheEchidna]

That was the quickest 7 minutes of my life. Despite the tension, it really felt like but a single minute. The moment the rover touched the top of the atmosphere, everything seemed to happen so fast.

[oshunluvr]

We watched it live last night - very exciting!

[eggbert]

I was also skeptical it would work. I thought the design was overly complex with too many points of failure. Happy I was wrong, this is an amazing peice of engineering.

I don't understand why we can't perfect this technology and get the costs down to where we can send a whole aramada of these things up there.

[JontheEchidna]

Taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I find it very mindblowing that we're able to take pictures like this.

[Snowhog]

Just cool. Way cool. Just think what could be accomplished if instead of the billions/trillions of dollars we waste on foolish endeavors such as wars, big government, etc, etc, we spent that money on space exploration? We could already have had manned landings on Mars if we had continued the space program as it was when Kennedy was President and he committed to putting a man on the moon.

[SteveRiley]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...-its-way-down/

The simple and sheer amazingness of this picture cannot be overstated. Here we have a picture taken by a camera on board a space probe that's been orbiting Mars for six years, reset and re-aimed by programmers hundreds of millions of kilometers away using math and science pioneered centuries ago, so that it could catch the fleeting view of another machine we humans flung across space, traveling hundreds of million of kilometers to another world at mind-bending speeds, only to gently -- and perfectly -- touch down on the surface mere minutes later.

The news these days is filled with polarization, with hate, with fear, with ignorance. But while these feelings are a part of us, and always will be, they neither dominate nor define us. Not if we don't let them. When we reach, when we explore, when we're curious -- that’s when we're at our best. We can learn about the world around us, the Universe around us. It doesn't divide us, or separate us, or create artificial and wholly made-up barriers between us. As we saw on Twitter, at New York Times Square where hundreds of people watched the landing live, and all over the world: science and exploration bind us together. Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people.

[SteveRiley]

I don't understand why we can't perfect this technology and get the costs down to where we can send a whole aramada of these things up there.

During the press conference last night, we learned that the cost for this mission was $2,500,000,000, or "about $7 per American citizen," as one person put it. That's quite a bargain, considering that a typical Space Shuttle launch cost was $450,000,000. Curiosity's ROI over its lifetime is likely to be magnificent.

[Snowhog]

And man is it impressive what that $7.00 per citizen gets us! (Mars Science Laboratory) When you take in to account that the 'minimum' operating life of the RTG power source is 14 years, the cost goes way down. A better bargain for scientific discovery will be hard to beat.

[GreyGeek]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba...-its-way-down/

Nice article. I remember well the unity the world experienced during the Apollo 13 crisis. People in every nation, race or creed were hoping for their safe return. Our country was more unified following 9/11 than any time in the past that I can remember, save for the return of the vets from Gulf War I..

But, not all the news from science is good:
http://www.nature.com/news/human-cyc...cience-1.11078

[SteveRiley]

Linearized image from the hazard avoidance camera.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multime.../?ImageID=4251

[JontheEchidna]

That first picture actually had a shot of the heat shield *as it was falling*.



The rover itself got a picture of the heatshield as it was falling away:



And it took a 4 fps video of the landing:

[pauly]

Happy to see I was wrong.

[Teunis]

I too am of the generation that witnessed the moon landings and although unmanned this landing is on a comparable technical level.
The moon shots were in their time using a mix of the best tech available and a lot of boldness, the same happened again with a fantastic outcome.
Because going for this complex system of landing was a bold decision.