Is the scariest part getting into the atmosphere at the correct angle?

Does the sky crane have a failure potential based on the fact that it's never been tried on Mars?

Narrowing the landing ellipse eases my fears about the early parts of this process. The sky crane part has me all twisted up in concern!

Cant beleive they have taken down access to the real time high res images, Venus has been visible in SDO cameras for over an hour.

There are a seven named peaks in Gusev in the vicinity of Spirit.

What impressed me was it's power budget of 4000 watts. Yowza.

I doubt the camera is even designed to image the sun without being wrecked.

I was under the impression the only actively guided part was the initial ballistic entry using the Nitrogen jets on the back shell.

The MSL entry guidance algorithm is divided into four phases. Entry interface marks the start of guided entry:
guidance is initialized in the pre-bank phase and the controller commands bank attitude hold until the sensed acceleration exceeds 0.5 Earth g’s.
Once the sensed acceleration exceeds the specified trigger limit, the range control phase begins. During the range control phase, the bank angle is commanded to minimize predicted downrange error at parachute deployment.
Throughout this phase, cross-range error is maintained with a manageable deadband limit by executing bank reversals as necessary.
Peak heating and peak deceleration occur during this guidance phase.
Once the navigated relative velocity drops below about 900 m/s, guidance transitions to a heading alignment phase to minimize residual cross-range error before parachute deployment.
Just prior to parachute deployment, the vehicle angle of attack is adjusted to 0° by ejecting balance masses while the azimuth is aligned for better radar performance later during parachute descent. Parachute deployment is triggered at a navigated velocity of over 450 m/s.

and our much thicker atmosphere
the air will play a much bigger role