On a light note, has anyone made any plans for 5 August? It is, after all, less than one hundred days away now, and I'm sure Mars is getting very big in the window for ol' Curiosity.
I hope they'll get a webcast going. I'll be frantically clicking on 'refresh' on here come what may!...
[MOD NOTE: Topic moved to Chit Chat for obvious reasons.]
Could be tricky... I'll be travelling, coming back to Victoria BC from a stay in Tofino that day. Where will I be at the time? Will I have internet? The pain of uncertainty will be offset by the pleasure of being on Vancouver Island. What tho' the spicy breezes...
Phil
According to Wikipedia planned landing is the evening of August 5 PDT, which is morning of August 6 UT.
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Assuming this turns out to be correct. Then in my CDT time zone: the way I figure it, if I stay awake till 3AM at the latest I should get all important available information. Then I can sleep about six hours and be back on line no later than 9:00 AM! I will leave my computer on so I won't need to boot up. Will stock up on snacks and microwave meals.
Since I am retired nothing should get in the way, although the fact that it will be August in Mississippi, and I am about 1500 feet / (500 m) from the Gulf of Mexico - certainly could change my plans!
Seriously, I think I will wait to make detailed plans. I sometimes over-plan
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I wonder how much time Curiosity will spend near the landing site checking system status, and I guess functional testing of the instruments. No driving off of a landing stage anyway.
My current plan is to be at work, to see if I can be of any help to the HiRISE folks.
http://www.planetary.org/get-involved/events/planetfest-2012/ sounds good.
The Society will be having a Planetfest in Pasadena, for those of you eager to celebrate (or mourn) with 2000 other rabid fans. There is discussion of trying to create satellite Planetfests; I'm not sure how likely that is to come to pass. I am 95% certain that our event will be webcast. How much value will be added to NASA TV I'm not sure (since we will be relying on NASA TV for the feed from mission control), but our event will be webcast.
As for me, I plan to be jumping up and down at JPL.
Hopefully the Pasadena Planetfest, provided that my bloody job doesn't get in the way as it is wont to do...
The landing is very early on Monday morning in the UK so I'll be going to bed early and then getting up and watching from home from around an hour before entry.
I'm then taking the whole week off work to follow and learn how to handle MSL data
James
On our side in France, we, at Societe Astronomique de France (which represents also TPS in France) and at the Mars Society, are planning to do a live event in Paris like we did before for the landings of MPF (1997), MPL (1999), Spririt and Opportunity (2004) and Phoenix (2008), with a NASA-TV internet feed.
The only problem is that the MSL lands early Monday morning (August 6) for us, around 5:00 am ECT and that our National museums are closed in Paris at this time. It's difficult for us to have them open at night for the Public, especially for safety measures (we need a minimum of security and at least 1 fireman), and we are working hard on this. I'll keep you informed
Do we know what the image release policy will be?
Phil
As far as I know, all images from all imaging instruments will be released quickly, same policy as with MER and Cassini. However, I don't know whether the metadata available will be more MER-like or more Cassini-like. Let's hope for the former
I know what i will be doing:
Oh, that's dark, Paolo! (Welcome back, stranger!)
Dark but very funny.
I took the Monday off so I can stop up very late, until we get the pictures back from post landing.
I've got the best gig of all!
It's going to be the afternoon of Monday August 6 here and landing is set for 3:18 SCT and 3:32 ERT.
I'll be hosting an event at Canberra DSN with a few hundred people watching events on NASA TV and looking out the window at the antennas providing the communication link to MSL/MRO/ODY
Any locals interested in coming along are welcome.
This is a real treat from Matt Heverly, Mobility Systems Engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory rover.
He https://twitter.com/#!/Matt_Heverly/status/197542472342188032/photo/1 this very cool image...
Might be unnerving if we saw bootprints.
Note how soft the edge of the shadows are... a symptom of being closer to the sun, thus it's angular size being much larger.
---edit---
I remain - uh, Curious - about the factor of atmosphere in calculating the trajectory of the landing of MSL. When was the likely atmospheric effect established, and from what data? Because, parachute? On Mars?? Just ask weathermen on earth, that atmosphere can change a lot!
I was under the impression the only actively guided part was the initial ballistic entry using the Nitrogen jets on the back shell. After that it's not guided, as one of the team said later they hope to add more active guidance and keep shrinking the landing circle to 7 km or so on future missions. The initial guidance though of course helps make the landing circle a bit smaller this time.
I am doing my level best to remain entirely ignorant of Planetfest planning, so that I can avoid any responsibility for it! So if the amount of information on our website doesn't satisfy you (it shouldn't, it's pretty thin right now) then send email to tps@planetary.org with your questions. The more you hassle them about certain things now, the more likely those things are to come to pass
It'll be about 10:35pm Pacific.
Finally we found our auditorium for our MSL/Curiosity landing event on Monday August 6 early morning (06:30 am Paris time).
It will be located at Verneuil, the city which shares with Les Mureaux the Ariane V launcher plant, just 30 km west from the center of Paris.
It's fully equipped with all you can dream about to make big events (like the Von Karman Auditorium at JPL...).
This will be a free event and open to the public.
It will be organized in cooperation with the French section of the Mars Society + Societe Astronomique de France (the corresponding member of TPS in France)
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