Sunday night (tonight) - Monday morning
Just thought I remind everyone who’s a bit of space junkie or just has an interest in witnessing something pretty cool that will be shown from 11:30 PM-4 AM EST. The “Curiosity” landing itself should occur around 1-1:30 AM EST
Also if you’re an XBOX Live user, you can watch it for free on your console:
The main stream will be NASA’s very own:
Anyways like I said its just a reminder, im not a space wiz or anything but I do appreciate these progressive steps that we take as a species towards understanding the universe.
Was about to post this in science thread. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out, what with the new method of approach and landing. It’s about time we stopped just dumping our stuff on the surface in a giant balloon.
Gotta love the jingoistic overtones of the NASA press conference. It’s not enough to send meticulously engineered shrapnel across space anymore - we have to send our petty vices with it.
odyssey and curiousity working at the same time on the surface of another planet.
roving capabilities on mars for 8 straight years now, and this one is expected to last at least 2 years.
“but this ship carries no consumables. the only parts of wear and tear are the motors, joints, etc that are exposed to the cold and suffer more from temperature changes. we test those to three times life expectancy; we don’t test to failure. we’ve planned out a mission for 2 years, but there’s no reason this rover couldn’t last twice that amount of time.”
eventually we’ll colonize mars and rescue the rovers. centuries later when earth has nuked itself to death, the descendants of the colonists will worship the rovers as dead gods, someday to be woken again by a prophet with technical know how.
Heh, I’ve been on some sort of Mars bender lately (re-installed and played Doom 3, watched original Total Recall, and then Watchmen last night). What in the fuck was that giant glass palace he built? That’s like the only part of the movie I don’t understand.
I haven’t seen the movie, but by the narration in the book, it’s something he created on a whim.
Despite his distance from his human self, it’s a meticulous clockwork-like construction (really, that description goes for the palace, the chapter, and the whole book) that reveals that he still has his old sensibilities as a watchmaker. I think it appears at first as an indicator that he’s simply interested in the mechanistic workings of the universe, but it becomes an indicator that he still appreciates something of his own lost individuality and that he might yet appreciate that quality in others. And he eventually does.
