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Mars Science Labroratory Curiosity landing should be fan-effing-tastic!!!!!
Phil Plait has a great writeup on his Bad Astronomy Blog: Landing on Mars: Seven minutes of terror:
This. Is. AWESOME! How the bat-guano crazy engineers at NASA and JPL are going to land the Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars:
Holy crap. NASA, throw lots more money at the production company that made this video! You want to excite the public? They did it right.
Now think about this: the rover weighs — get this — 890 kilograms, nearly a ton. The Mars air is thick enough that engineers have to deal with it, but too thin to bring Curiosity all the way to the surface safely. So they need a heat shield to slow it initially, a parachute to brake even more, and then rocket motors to drop it the rest of the way.
Now think about this: the rover weighs — get this — 890 kilograms, nearly a ton. The Mars air is thick enough that engineers have to deal with it, but too thin to bring Curiosity all the way to the surface safely. So they need a heat shield to slow it initially, a parachute to brake even more, and then rocket motors to drop it the rest of the way.
Phil's right about the production company that did the video. They make the Curiosity rover's landing as exciting as a good science fiction movie. I'd love to get some friends together for a Curiosity party; say if we could find someone with a large screen TV and cable, so we could watch the NASA channel coverage of the landing. We could bring champagne to toast Curiosity's success. If the landing fails, I'd still want to toast the JPL team for a really good try!
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