I believe they actually targeted the spot they landed in. I do not think they aimed for the middle of the ellipse. The closer they are to Sharp the quicker they can get to that science.

All wheeled vehicles can get stuck in sand. The trick now is to recognize potential traps, and to set "wheel slip" limits to avoid digging in the wheels, which I assume they did not with Oppy when she go stuck in pergutary.

It all happened so quickly, parachute, then almost immediately, touch down, awesome. And as for the pics, double awesome !

The speed is really ramping up now on Eyes.

No, not enough fuel or power.

The Pu238 is in protective ceramic cakes. It's highly unlikely to ever to pollute Mars. It also has a half life and will eventually decay into a less harmless compound.

To comply with the Planetary Protection Protocol they used fairly nonreactive tungsten. Lead is deadly poisonous.

The problem then is you'd have to safely land all the embedded rover/landers, have comms setup for them, and teams to run the submissions, all costing many many $$$. The throw away mass is what it is, it's a needed design feature.

Airbags are not off the menu, they just could not design any strong enough for the weight of MSL, so rockets were needed.

They said they have cool graphics of the landing driven by the data they get from the UHF transmission live, so what you see on the screen is what actually happened, the data coming from the bent pipe transmission via Odyssey. Odyssey will get data from the landed rover for several minutes AFTER the landing, that way they hope to get a couple of pictures back and engineering data under ideal circumstances.

They will have a cool graphic showing the landing according to the received data, so if we see the rover sitting on the surface, we can assume most likely it was successful.

From a layman, the main thing is it's designed to be successful, so barring a mistake, bad luck or hardware fault, it should all work just fine !

As you climb the mountain the layers show the younger and younger history of the changes, that way they can figure out a more complete history of the crater. They do indeed expect to find the answers to the main questions at the bottom, the climb to the top will take many more years than the initial two year mission.

Is there going to be another press conference before landing ?

Well the comms orbit would be after an extended mission then .

Awesome, I did not realize the chute opened so late.

I believe the plan with MAVEN is to park it in a good orbit for communications once the primary mission objectives are achieved, I think I heard that on a conference one time. It would be illogical to put an electra onboard that could hardly be utilized.

"NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., will provide navigation support, the Deep Space Network, and Electra telecommunications relay package."

Overview

So yes to Q1.

As far as I recall it's going to be NASA policy to fly a relay package on all NASA orbiters, and proberbly ESA has the same policy.

MSL course fine tuned Sat night.

MSL

I was pretty sure all the stops would be removed to get ODY in place for such an important landing, successful or not, as we all know it's important to have as much data from the EDL as possible.

Odyssey maybe moved back into the correct orbit. If not then the overflight by Odyssey will indeed be a few hours later. Odyssey does have plenty of propellent left to get back into the correct orbit.

There seems to be a glaring error in the press kit, it refers to a post launch briefing, after the landing.

Oh I remember the Cassini launch and then thinking "ok in 7 years time it's going to arrive, what do I do in the meantime"
....lol.

Now I feel guilty you posted such a long reply. I'm NOT one of the people on UMSF that creates images, I just enthusiastically view them.

Could someone create a slope map please, I don't know how to do that.