7 minutes of terror tomorrow night

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It's down and operating. I watched it live on fox news, on line. Pretty exciting. Loved it.  ;D

Ray D  ;D
 
I did not watch it live, don't have CNN here, just Over the AIr,  but on the news this AM they said it was down and imprinting JPL all over the Martian surface.

Oh, you don't see the JPL...
It is in morse code.
 
I couldn't stay awake and couldn't watch it on the NASA channel so went to bed.  I knew in the morning Curiosity would be on Mars one way or another.  Of course, it's on all the news sites and comics this morning, but this one, I think, sums it up best :)
 
I am soooooooo proud to be an American. What a fantastic moment. I was watching NASA TV online most of yesterday. As excited as I got over the landing I can't even imagine what the engineers at JPL were feeling when Curiosity touched down. I thought it was cool that there were 6 photographers on camera at one time in the control room right before touchdown. I think that may have been the first time a 256 x 256 image was call "high resolution", but compared to the 64 x 64 thumbnail that came down first it was hi res.

It just blows my mind that we can send a SUV sized vehicle and send it 352 million miles through space and have it land safely precisely where and when it was suppose to land. I am so proud to be an American.
 
Amazing, also, once things started happening, it went really fast.  I still don't know what "live" means when it takes 14 minutes to get a signal... it was all done and finished before they received anything, actually.  Also, when a signal is sent that travels 186,000 miles/second; how does it get from zero miles/sec to 186,000 miles/second and where does it go after we get it?
 
I still don't know what "live" means when it takes 14 minutes to get a signal...
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'Live' in my message meant "watched the broadcast live", including the various moments of euphoria by the team and their subsequent large 'group' meeting. That's as live as it could be, and I suspect that most folks who watched it understood that.

No communications are truly 'live'; There's a finite propagation delay even if the transmitting and receiving antennae are adjacent to each other. Ask my other half about our variable propagation delay; She'll tell you it lengthens exponentially as the honey-do list grows  ;)
 
I agree with Tom. When I said I was going to watch the landing live I meant watch the broadcast of the JPL lab during the final moments of decent and seeing the first photos transmitted back to earth. The fact that it is 14 minutes delayed is meaningless to me. Claiming that you are not watching it live is a dumb as claiming no one watched the moon landing live because it takes one and a half seconds for the signal to travel from the moon to Earth.
 
when a signal is sent that travels 186,000 miles/second; how does it get from zero miles/sec to 186,000 miles/second and where does it go after we get it?
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That's a cue for Lou Schneider, our resident radio transmission pro, although I suspect we have a number of 'experts' here.

I recall during the first moon landing I was maintaining CCTV systems; Due to dangerous environmental issues, monitors were located half a mile from the cameras. One user asked why we had such clear communications with the moon, but his pictures from just half a mile away were lousy at best and sometimes non-existent  :-[
 
zzyzx said:
I agree with Tom. When I said I was going to watch the landing live I meant watch the broadcast of the JPL lab during the final moments of decent and seeing the first photos transmitted back to earth. The fact that it is 14 minutes delayed is meaningless to me. Claiming that you are not watching it live is a dumb as claiming no one watched the moon landing live because it takes one and a half seconds for the signal to travel from the moon to Earth.
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Thanks for the JAB Tom!  I feel properly reprimanded.  BTW, the people on the moon were watching it live!
 
There is hope for the world yet. 

Yea scientist!!!

We can still build a better mouse trap.......

Nice to know we are building things that was not designed to destroy the world..

What a great achievement.
 
Tom said:
That's a cue for Lou Schneider, our resident radio transmission pro, although I suspect we have a number of 'experts' here.

I recall during the first moon landing I was maintaining CCTV systems; Due to dangerous environmental issues, monitors were located half a mile from the cameras. One user asked why we had such clear communications with the moon, but his pictures from just half a mile away were lousy at best and sometimes non-existent  :-[
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That's an easy one to answer...picture was clearer because it was filmed in a Hollywood studio...excuse  me while I adjust my tinfoil hat... ??? ???
 
Also, when a signal is sent that travels 186,000 miles/second; how does it get from zero miles/sec to 186,000 miles/second and where does it go after we get it?
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Simple answer - radio waves are just a lower frequency version of light waves.  They leave the transmitting antenna at that speed (the speed of light), and when they get to the receiver whatever is not absorbed by the antenna just keeps on going until it hits something else or fades out.

Like waves generated by dropping a rock in a pond, radio waves get weaker as they travel away from the source, and eventually become weak enough that they're no longer distinguishable from the background noise.

If you fired up a LARGE light on Mars, those light waves would also leave the light bulb at 186,000 miles per second, travel at that speed and take the same 14 minutes to be visible on Earth.
 
We tuned in NASA TV about an hour before the landing and watched for an hour after the landing.  Betty kept saying she was going to go to bed but she stayed and watched the whole thing.  The tension on the faces of the JPL people prior to the landing and the celebration at the time of landing was really something to behold!!  It was one of the most enjoyable things I've watched on television in a long time.
 
Here is some recorded live footage from the landing, recorded by Curiosity itself.
 
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