[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Myself, Chris Lintott, and Peter Grindrod will be gathering at Sir Patrick Moore's house, Farthings in Selsey, on Sunday afternoon. The four of us will be Blogging, uStreaming and Youtubing our way through the night, pulling together any and every source of information we can find, previewing the events of the evening, and hopefully filling the gaps between NASA TV coverage. I'll also be making sure we 'stand down' during Emily's hour at JPL, as frankly, I want to watch it myself!

We've set up a blog to preview events and to be a home for the content we come up with on the big night - hopefully some of you will pop in and pass comment through the night! We will have more details closer to the time at http://www.marslive.co.uk

[dvandorn]

Oh, yes -- as much as I'm trying to hold it back and save myself the crushing disappointment if anything goes wrong, I have to admit that I'm getting very excited.

Lines from totally unrelated movies and TV shows keep popping into my head in relation to the upcoming event. For example, all of last week, I could see myself commenting right before the landing "I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work."

Today, as I realized we're four days away from landing, I found myself paraphrasing a line by John Adams from the film 1776 (the character was speaking of the Declaration of Indepence, I'm only adjusting the line slightly): "This landing will be a triumph! I tell you, a triumph! If I was ever sure of anything, I'm sure of that. A triumph. And if it isn't, we still have four days left to think of something else."



-the other Doug