2 hours and 19 minutes until surface contact. For fair or ill. Slowing these things down generally poses the largest challenges, and this time largest yet. So light a candle or whatever works for you to bend the odds.
I was thinking that when younger I would have stayed up for this, but I am old and tired. "My town is so rural the Catholics hold midnight mass at 9 PM so they can get up and farm in the morning"
They'll be showing it live here, since the radio link is in Australia. 24 minutes to go..... fingers crossed. And I'll be staying up for it, since it's at 3:31 on Monday afternoon and I'm at work. As a British person, I have to question NASA's insistence on using Rovers for this sort of work. British cars don't have the best reliability record: I'd have gone for a Toyota or a Hyundai or something.
Scott Maxwell drives a Prius to the JPL, the Curiosity rover at work His other car is on Mars - CNN.com
Ah, with the 1.6 litre engines? That's OK then. I can rest easy. They should be careful on the bumpy bits, though: the rear suspension was always a bit dodgy.
The one I rented for week in the UK about 1993 was 1600cc. Looking at Wikipedia I think it was a Rover 400. Nice car. I watched the JPL control room crew as Curiosity landed. You could almost smell the stress in the room over the internet. I bet there is going to be some serious celebrating in Pasadena tonight. I heard that with the present distance between Mars and Earth it took 14 minutes for Curiosity's signal to get back to Earth. It could have been smashed to pieces before we started receiving data that it was in Mars atmosphere.
Ah, yes. They weren't terrible. My Dad did have a nice Rover in the 80s - a 1964 Rover 110, like this. This one is even the same colour as my Dad's, in fact. These days, of course, Rover is owned by SAIC, and it's inexplicably called Roewe.
That may be as close as you can come to transliterating Rover into Mandarin Edit: I looked it up on Wikipedia
...well I love it (the Mars landing). They say this proves we still have the know-how and competence to do something like this. But this project was started 10 yrs ago, so I am not convinved. Let's see if we can do it yet again.
