Agreed - SA-SPaH is breathtakingly complex and a beautiful piece of engineering - Dan does a great job of explaining it.

And burn 600 Whrs just to heat up the mobility actuators to do so? Non starter.

They clearly said, repeatedly, in the press conference that this will just degrade the wind measurements. Not eliminate them or break them, just degredation when the functioning mast is in the wind 'shadow' of the mast.

You mean MAHLI.

There is hope to do a self portrait at some point in the future- but not yet.

Nope - not yet - still waiting on the reconstructed trajectory. Another couple of weeks I'm afraid.

Looks like the old MERtian trick of cloud watching.

There's a pair of nearly finished MastCam's - one could find a lovely home on that arm. I really hope they can find the $ to do it.

Yeah - but that was only the vehicle telling us it had issues the command to the descent stage to flyaway.

0.6 seconds after that command - the descent stage throttles up to 60% of 4 engines for 6 seconds. In those 0.6 seconds, the bridles and umbilical have to cut...oh...and the descent stage now has no idea what its altitude is - it just assumes it's level and 'ok' for those 0.6 seconds before throttling up. That was the scary bit

Hence the pause and the wait for confirmation that several second had elapsed after that time that included a continued strong UHF signal, and the RIMU ( rover IMU ) was stable. THEN - @icancallubetty could call 'Touchdown Confirmed'

That's cool - PLUTO was an awesome and cunning little piece of kit.

Yeah - at full length it's 7.5 meters from the top of the deck to the skycrane....which puts it about 8.5m above the surface.

BUT - there's probably 3 seconds of 0.75m/sec constant velocity descent of the descent stage after touchdown - so that 7.5 bridle will have wound back in by about 2.25m - so surface would have been 6.25m.

D

You did the same thing I did

http://youtu.be/RZioPhfxnSY?hd=1

From the Washington Post who, as Emily pointed out on Twitter, posted the Curiosity had landed 2 days before it arrived.

They may well be right, but wait for the conference.

Flakes fractured off the surface of other rocks while the descent stage was blasting the surface?

I had a stab at doing an MSSS like re-projection and rotation. Net result of all 600ish frames online so far -

http://youtu.be/v45vFbTg6KM

I'm playing them at 6fps ( so 150% of realtime )

Filling in the sky's not worth it - but I think this works.

(You were not expecting that were you One thing they probably didn't think of was the MER heritage for Navcam...carries over to experience of us amateurs stitching those Navcam images for 8 years )

It's been a long way, but we're here.

It's just like any other mountain - you very rarely see the absolute summit till you're on it.

Yeah- there are some serious flight rules about sun-pointing the mast. You can do it for a few minutes, but then you have to turn away and let the ChemCam unit cool down. It's a big-ol reflecting telescope in there , and even at 1.5au - the sun can still do damage when you focus an area of its power.

The spares are not there because they worry the drill will wear out. They're there in case the drill gets stuck.

The audio itself will be right here ; http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html

The dust getting picked up is probably from the throttle up for the deceleration to 0.75m/sec - so we're probably around 55m up.

It's more like 3.88

These are all quite a way before touchdown - they show the divert maneuver and the beginning of the constant velocity phase.

Its calibration target.

http://www.msl-chemcam.com/index.php?menu=...sup&art=207

Mars EPO - headed by Michelle Viotti

No - none.