I thought this was posted somewhere already but I can’t find it. This is that crazy skycrane landing they developed. You can watch live coverage tonight online.
hopefully i can stay up to watch it touchdown
This thing isn’t exactly small like the previous ones. About the size of a small SUV:
Not completely OT but what new technologies/innovations have we developed because of this mission?
I sure hope everything goes well…
One little oops and the whole thing is scrap 
Well it has a nuclear power generator on board that will power everything for 5+ years. Gimme that in a car, lol.
I don’t know all the details other than this is the largest thing we’ve sent there and it’s such a tricky move. Some networks are going to have live coverage tonight too.
I’m not going to miss it.
Live internet feed.
Nerding out right now
Safe landing!
Great success!
NASA needs to get the PR team involved a little more and time these things so they aren’t happening at 1:30am.
^^ That’s the last thing they’re worried about, lol.
We found dirt! Now starting to look for life…
unedited:
It’s funny Iran can’t make a missile that goes 200 miles but we can send a robot to mars lol
Well it needs to be. The only way NASA is ever going to get proper funding is to learn to put on a show for the taxpayers. They realized it (albeit late) with Apollo 11 and hastily threw up a dish in Australia so they could broadcast the landing live in prime time.
Jay, night & day on Mars doesn’t exactly match up with night & day on Earth. They were trying to hit a specific (small) landing area near a specific crater during the martian daytime. If the landing window doesn’t line up with prime-time TV on the east coast, oh well.
I’m glad scientist are worried about the science instead of changing their thoroughly thought out time tables to suit the causal guy looking to catch a NASA-style reality show before going to bed.
There wasn’t a camera or anything to see anyway except a bunch of science nerds jumping for joy:
^ Look, I’m all for the science of it, and a huge proponent of NASA getting more funding. To get that funding though you need to get people excited about their projects and having people watch this live, with all the excitement a live event brings, would have been a great moment for NASA. Seeing a headline the next day just isn’t the same.
Bottom line, NASA was allowed to do great things when the country was excited about space and willing to write the checks. If you look at NASA historically the timeline feels completely backwards. They put a man on the moon, then spent decades putting men in low earth orbit to reach the point today where they can’t even get a man off the ground.
This is so cool. I love NASA and sucked to see their funding cut. This project started in 2004 and cost $2.5 billion total. Erie County alone has paid almost 5 billion since 2001 for the wars.
These people in that video spent a huge part of their careers testing and developing this and when it launched in November, they just waited for this 7 minutes and hope this didn’t bury itself info the surface. So cool.