Rational Action

The Mars party was somewhat less happening than I wanted it to be, but since it happened at all, it was more happening than I expected. Emily, Chris, Lora, Moses, and I all chilled in Emily’s room and I prepped her computer to tune into NASA TV. I got the latest Realplayer installed with seconds to spare, and tuned in.

Landing on Mars is a tricky but very, very cool thing to do. I’m impressed enough that we’ve got two (three if you count the European) orbiters creating a sort of telecommunications net on another planet besides our own. I’m even more impressed that now we have two little cars driving around there too.

With the right conditions, the landers can communicate with the orbiters (and even directly with the Earth) on their way in. Unfortunately the quality of the communications is pretty unpredictable — for example, the first Mars rover went silent for 6 minutes during its entry. Judging by what I heard during this landing, comms were excellent: (Events are probably out of order and paraphrased poorly)

“We have 50 seconds to parachute deployment…”
“Parachute deployment confirmed”
Sudden burst of cheering
“Heat shield separation confirmed”
More cheering

There were probably 6 bursts of cheers as the landing executed flawlessly. The lander maintained “tones” (Low bandwidth Earth communication) throughout the whole process, which kept everyone up to date, albeit with a 11 minute speed-of-light lag. When I had seen and heard enough cheering, I figured that the lander had come to a stop alive on the surface of Mars. I closed RealPlayer and went back to partying.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2004 at 1:51 am and is filed under Computer Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.