It’s weird to think the moment we all saw them jump up and applaud at the good news that the lander had already landed about 10 minutes before that. Space is so big, or the speed of light is too slow, one of those. 
3 Likes
Yeah I guess they got tired of prefacing every sentence with “10 minutes ago”. 
1 Like
Or perhaps the speed of light, being an absolute maximum, and when it comes to human scale interaction the definition of simultaneity, is an irrelevance. The stuff happens to us, in our perspective, as we see it. Ergo, the lander lands as we receive the telemetry of it landing.
Imagine not being able to watch the big game live due to a late shift at the job. Do you want someone to tell you the score as it happens, or do you want the game “unspoiled” so it can feel live to you as you watched the tivo’d replay? Except in the mars rovers’ case theres’ nobody who knows the score before you do.
It’s when we want to steer or direct the lander that the discrepancy between our now and it’s now becomes rather poignant.
So much code and machinery so absolutely perfectly debugged. It’s just amazing.
Half a million lines of code for that automated landing sequence, IIRC. Spectacular.
2 Likes
Seeing how buggy our games are, and the amount of effort fighting those bugs takes, that is really, really spectacular 
The two tons of fine engineering and machinery coming off without a hitch through a mighty complex set of evolutions involving pyrotechnics, twelve rocket motors, a motherlovin’ crane and all of it having gone through the vibrations and G of a launch as well as a good 7G on arrival… Wow.
1 Like
I like to think that people around Aldebaran are just now getting excited by season 3 premier of ‘I Love Lucy’. It’s going to blow their minds when about this time next year the USSR launches Sputnik! 
JPL are absolutely rocking when it comes to Mars. So many others have failed with landers, but they keep on doing it, and it’s amazing. The Tianwen-1 is in orbit and is due to do a lander in a month or two (?), so it’ll be interesting to see how they do first time. The Russian’s in particular seem to have really bad luck with Mars.
My brother is an MIT graduate aero-astro engineer (a literal rocket scientist, who decided to go fly helos for the USN and then the Coast Guard, but I digress), so I have met quiet a few of his friends/classmates who work for various space entities. The best way I can sum of some of the differences is this:
JPL/NASA/Government: You have $300 million USD, make it work. The timetable is sometime before we all retire, but sooner rather than later please. Here is an entire library of some of the greatest minds of our time that had ideas, thoughts, and experiments. Do it once, and do it right. We aren’t building another one of these for probably a presidential administration or 3, so get it right.
SpaceX/Private Entities: We have a basically unlimited budget IF we can pull this off. Right now the angel investors and venture capital is pouring in, capitalize on it. We test and build at the same time. Have a backup plan for when the first one most likely craters or explodes. Don’t kill anyone, and don’t wreck the infrastructure. Make it work, and get it done before the other guys does. If they do it first, we go out of business.
Honestly reminded me a lot of working in the software industry.
3 Likes
Post-landing briefing scheduled for no earlier than 2021-02-18T22:30:00Z at the JPL Youtube channel.
1 Like
Pick your own joke:
-
The mission of searching for ancient signs of life seems to be going well.
-
How come they can get a Nuclear Power station on Mars quicker than get one to Texas?
(just covering all the bases, keeping all equally upset is the key)
12 Likes
I’m pretty excited that they’re trying out a MOXIE with this rover. A pretty important experiment - paving the way for making oxygen for breathing / to be used as propellant for return trips.
3 Likes
Direct link here, not started yet:
1 Like
I just woke up. Did it land? Please say it landed
1 Like
It did, but it got a weird image back…
spoiler
5 Likes
As I am the DOOMSLAYER I find that quite difficult to believe 
Go humans go!!
2 Likes
As per a reddit comment, this is technically the world’s first Extra-Terrestrial Nuclear Powered Aircraft Carrier.
1 Like
I’m one step closer to getting a star destroyer is the way I see it
1 Like
The landing method still blows my mind. Can you imagine the first person to pitch that idea!-)
Hats off to Nasa’s engineers, scientists , and (of course) software developers.
2 Likes
So…
Is there life on Mars?
3 Likes
So apparently the photos from the ground so far are sent via a UHF antenna to the various orbiters as they fly over the landing site - the orbiters then relay the data to earth.
They have a high gain antenna but that’s currently stowed until they unfold it in the coming days, at which point they have more direct bandwidth.
1 Like
2 Likes