The NASA Curiosity Rover on Mars

TOUCHDOWN!

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

The Olympics is nothing compared to this. This is definitely the event of the year.

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First images of the surface coming through now. Awesome.

And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)

IT'S GOOD!

I'm baaaaaaack

Can you believe it? It's landed just now and we saw some images already. This is beyond belief.

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So we live in an age where all of us, from all over the world, just watched something land on a planet 350,000,000 miles away live with immediate pictures of the surface of another world coming back at us.

Take a bow, humanity.

And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)

I love how modest the celebration over there in mission control really is, considering the sheer scale of their accomplishment.

This is NASA's triumph, and that of its international associates, and of science and mankind in general.

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Good shit. Throw another one in the win column for the USA and mankind as a whole.

Saw the live feed; heard a "holy shit!" in the background. Would have to agree with him, there.

"I've come to the conclusion that this is a very stupid idea."

We still got it.

Proud member of the IAA What's the point of being grown up if you can't act childish?

It's hardly over for us yet.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

Ah man, awesome.

Two black and white, slightly grainy, slightly dust-obscured images of some dirt and the rover's wheels - and they're amazing

Now if only they'd show them some more on the stream

The celebration is modest now; but if I know researchers, later they will party hard.

They deserve it. They deserve ALL THE DRINKS. EVER.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

This is a wonderful year for our species and our science, what with CERN's recent achievents and now this.

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Glad the rover landed safely.

Now I wonder when there will be some nicer pictures.

I saw some tears there. Considering how many billions of dollars and years of people's lives just paid off, it's not surprising.

edited 5th Aug '12 10:47:53 PM by Gaunt88

Indeed. Go land apes!

edited 5th Aug '12 10:48:19 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Someone they interviewed during the approach said that one thing we can expect is unexpected discoveries. It's always the same with cutting-edge science: you find out much more than you expected, when you take on a project as huge as this.

This will definitely pay off many times over, even though the process itself has probably advanced our species enough to justify this.

edited 5th Aug '12 10:49:05 PM by BestOf

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Been suffering from insomnia and decided to kill some time watching this. Those grainy pictures makes it all worth it.

It worked! Awesome! There is a little wheeled robot thing on Mars as we speak!

Be not afraid...

I stayed up all night, too. When it was about midnight, I was still undecided about staying up or sleeping a bit, but by 2 in the morning I thought I'd go with it. I started watching the stream around 5 in the morning, when they were playing stock footage, and I stopped a couple of times before tuning in a bit before the live broadcast started at about 7 AM.

Before the Americans hog all the glory, I should mention that this really is an international project. This list of the instruments onboard Curiosity shows that Germany, Spain, Finland and Russia are among the countries that have designed and built instruments for this project.

edited 5th Aug '12 10:54:42 PM by BestOf

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Yeah, we might get lucky and this could be the one that discovers something that changes everything.

And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)

Would it really have been that hard to invest in a color photo capability though?

That being said, still totally awesome. Now we just need to get some people on that bitch.

What would y'all think about a manned one-way mission to mars? As in a mission where the entire crew knows it won't come back, and its mission is to go there, take and analyze tons of samples, and basically just research as much as they can for as long as they can.

That would take some special people.

Be not afraid...

I'm pretty sure that the cameras aren't at fault for the lack of colour, but that colour pictures take up so much more bandwidth that they chose to go monochrome to get files as small as possible so that we could get some on time before the satellite orbiting Mars disappeared below the horizon.

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