Posted on 08/05/2012 11:04:03 AM PDT by hattend
Landing at 10:30PM Pacific...yes, this is early so all the aviation, space, astronomy and science pingers can "get 'er done".
We are dead flat broke. Printing money to station troops in 125 countries and working on drinking coffee and eating pizza in the interstate while we patch little holes. 43% of the population doesn’t work and obama is winning because people want free stuff and we are are doing rocket ships to rocks where the temperature is - 67 degrees F!! you cannot make this up. We are BROKE!! STOP already!
It will be Monday at 10PM Not tonight. On the Science Channel
The budget goes to defense, medicare, medicaid, social security, and interest on the debt.
At this point everything else in the budget is so trivial it doesn’t matter anymore and anyone talking about it is wasting time.
Some of the first four things need to be cut - a lot. That’s the only debate.
If you’re one of the people off ranting about the foreign aid or the space program or Congressional salaries or some idiotic little $1M study the government funded that sound silly, you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem
My thoughts exactly. The KISS principle for landing on a foreign planet seems to have been given the boot.
/johnny
Defense??Interest on the debt? Let’s just have a big party in Columbia with taxpayer funded whores and go to Mars. Honey we are Broke!! let’s go yo the $12 dollar movies!! Give me a break. Your rational is we are broke an spending our way into hyper inflation and total revaluation of the dollar so let’s go to Mars?? Really?
Defense??Interest on the debt? Let’s just have a big party in Columbia with taxpayer funded whores and go to Mars. Honey we are Broke!! let’s go to the $12 dollar movies!! Give me a break. Your rational is we are broke an spending our way into hyper inflation and total revaluation of the dollar so let’s go to Mars?? Really?
As someone once said...
Enough wit the negative vibes already.
Say, you’re not from around here ere ya?
Yeah, I thought is was going to be tonight.
Just saw a promo saying it was 10PM Monday
on the Science Channel.
Yes and no. Many of the individual elements of the landing were done with the MER rovers:
- guided descent with the aeroshell connected
- slowing with a supersonic parachute
- using a radar altimeter to stop descent at a specified altitude
- propulsively halting descent above the surface
- lowering the payload on a bridle
- cutting the bridle cleanly
The order of the landing elements is different — the MER’s were lowered on the bridle before halting descent as opposed to afterward, and there are of course no airbags, which requires extra precision in managing altitude as well as using weight-on-wheels measurements to trigger cutting the bridle. The divert and fly-away maneuvers are also new.
If you go to this NASA web site you can get a web app that lets you follow the progress of the Curiosity Rover:
http://eyes.nasa.gov/index.html
It has a live mode where you can see all the current stats (speed, distance, altitude) and also a preview mode where you can see what hopefully will happen later tonight.
Earth Occultation is supposed to occur roughly a minute and 59 seconds before touchdown. As best I can tell it looks like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be close to right overhead. It’d be neat if it really is able to film the landing.
I suppose it will happen when it happens and I will find out when I find out.
/johnny
Unfortunately, someone at NASA upgraded it to a newer rev of the Unity player, and it requires some kernel functions that aren’t in Windows 2000.
I’m using the extended Win2k kernel from http://www.msfn.org and it still can’t handle it.
I was talking about the Science Channel Special Tomorrow Night. Not the landing.
No matter what happens, It will be better than “John Carter”.
So 40 minutes or so, and we should see live coverage on NASA TV.
Maybe.
/johnny
That depends on the time zone ;^)
T minus 2 hours and 55 minutes to landing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.