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Touchdown!


Pete M
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I caugh it "live".  Of course, it takes several minutes for the signals to reach us so it was down for a while before we confirmed it.  Looking forward to the high res photos.  And, of course the photoshops with Marvin the Martian or Matt Damon.

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I watched the JPL live feed of that yesterday (I tried to watch the NASA feed, but it was too "pop culture" for me to handle, lol).  Simply amazing.  Like Jesse said, we hucked a one-ton contraption/hunk of very expensive parts 128 million miles away, and landed it in a spot smaller than my driveway.  LIKE.A.BOSS.

 

I listened to the person in charge of the operation on a radio interview this morning, and he was discussing the mission of the Rover.  It's job is to scour the surface and take bore samples (about the size and shape of a piece of chalk) and deposit them on the Martian surface.  Later, another mission is going to launch to go pick them up and assemble them into a return vehicle.  That vehicle then, they plan, will blast off from the surface and return to Earth.  That will mark another first for the space program, actually launching a vehicle from a planet (or moon) surface via a rocket, remotely.  We are living through history here.:usaflag:

 

edit:  I also learned that NASA/JPL's official phrase for when things are going perfectly on a mission is "nominal".  They are true masters of understatement.  Also, there are bags of peanuts in every control room during operations like this as a superstition/good luck charm.  I didn't hear the whole story, but it goes back to an old launch director or some other higher up that liked to eat peanuts and pass them around as a snack.  Thought that was kinda funny, and heartwarming at the same time.

 

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What makes this landing unique was that the vehicle used cameras and image processing to choose its own landing site.  And it did this with no outside intervention.  It was entirely autonomous.

 

We only got exact coordinates after the landing.

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There was about a 7 minute window from the point of computer detected touchdown until actual visual confirmation.  Talk about crapping nickels.....

 

Here's some info on the "lucky peanuts"  https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/10022/what-are-nasas-lucky-peanuts/

 

It's not mentioned there, but the guy was saying on one failed mission (that peanuts weren't in the room) back in the day involved the spacecraft missing the moon.......completely.  Talk about an "ooops" moment.:laugh:

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