Curiosity Rover: This is gonna be soooo cool!!!

[hausdok]

It'll be too bad that there's no way to watch this happen except in computer simulation; but if it works it's going to be write your own ticket time for the engineers that pull this off.

[utube]

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ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike

[Rob Amaral]

Nice.... and expensive... This sucker better work... !

[Jim Katen]

What could possibly go wrong?

[Rob Amaral]

.. Pretty cool stuff... Didn't 'the Mars team' lose a probe due to some mixup between metric/standard in regards to altitude measurements? It's nice to know that morons are prevalent at all levels..

[Marc]

.. Pretty cool stuff... Didn't 'the Mars team' lose a probe due to some mixup between metric/standard in regards to altitude measurements? It's nice to know that morons are prevalent at all levels..

Yeah. That was a joint Russian-American venture and the Russians use metrics. It highlighted the lack of communication between the two. Very embarrassing failure on both sides.

Success with the Mars project will be little more than a source of pride for the engineers along with a glowing entry on their resume'. The money goes mostly to the project investors. The engineers will have to look for another project if they want to eat.

Marc

[Garet]

The 'Mars Team' has a fairly low batting average (0.300 to 0.500?). Other mistakes were nearly as embarrassing as the metric issue.

[John Kogel]

.. Pretty cool stuff... Didn't 'the Mars team' lose a probe due to some mixup between metric/standard in regards to altitude measurements? It's nice to know that morons are prevalent at all levels..

Yeah. That was a joint Russian-American venture and the Russians use metrics. It highlighted the lack of communication between the two. Very embarrassing failure on both sides.

Who uses metric? Just Russia, China, Japan, all the European countries, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Australia ...

Who uses pounds and feet?

Sure, the Russians should have known better and switched when they worked with US software. I know Canucks have to. We're used to it. []

[Tom Raymond]

So the Rover has landed safely and NASA has successfully purged the landing sequence from the main computer and replaced it with the mission data. It should be ready to actually move in about a week after the back up computer has been similarly reprogrammed.

So who's the moron that thought it would be a good idea to send $2.5 billion in hardware to Mars with less memory (4 gig) than most people carry in their cell phones?

[mthomas1]

"So who's the moron that thought it would be a good idea to send $2.5 billion in hardware to Mars with less memory (4 gig) than most people carry in their cell phones?"

Uh... as is happens this really is rocket science, for example the TOTAL bandwidth back to Earth is 250 megabits = 30 megabytes per DAY, and that has to be shared with the data channels and the imaging required to control the rover...

[kurt]

Yeah, the Martians objected to cell towers in their neighborhoods....it's created a lot of dead zones and dropped calls.

[Jerry Simon]

Yeah, the Martians objected to cell towers in their neighborhoods....it's created a lot of dead zones and dropped calls.

Been there; done that. Just paid my AT&T canellation fee. Best money I've ever spent.

[Bill Kibbel]

My niece works for NASA (really). She emailed me the first pic sent back from mars.

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