Curiosity

So tonight at 1:30 am-ish the new Mars Rover, Curiosity, will, if all things go as planned, land gently on the surface near Gale Crater close to the Martian equator.

If I sound a little tentative it’s because there’s a lot that could go badly.

For one thing this whole separate rocket descender concept is a bit complicated.  The idea is that you don’t need the motors and fuel once you’re on the ground so you’re better off ditching them.  I think that stringing your mission critical cargo beneath another chunk of untested junk that could go spectacularly, amusingly, and expensively wrong is a mite…

ambitious.

But hey, I’m not a rocket scientist.

As I write NASA has already forgone their last course correction and is debating a final update to the data that the computers will use.  The rover has to land independent of radio control because light is slow and on a round trip to Mars takes just a little under half an hour.  If you’ve ever gamed over a sucky connection or are a high frequency trader you know what I’m talking about.

But people aren’t talking about that very real problem and are instead focused on the “Seven Minutes of Terror” that uses conventional atmospheric braking and includes a radio blackout from the plasma which will only be 50% or less (one way) of the regular everyday lag.

No one has a really good record at landing intact probes on Mars, though the United States has the best.  This is why last time out we sent both Opportunity AND Spirit in the expectation something would probably fail.

Instead they were both incredibly successful, far exceeding their designed objectives.

This time we have only 1 lander and it’s the size of an SUV, not a Golf Cart.  The mission is not to find life, but to determine if conditions on Mars could have supported the development of life.  I consider this a pretty settled question, but you can never know too much and actual results often lead to unexpected discoveries.

We will probably not know tonight, or even for the next week, whether things have gone as planned.  If the lander is even partly functional we can get some data, if not it would be 8 months to get there if we launched tomorrow.

However once down and functional Curiosity should prove much more capable than its predecessors.  It has nuclear power for one thing so we’ll be a lot less dependent on favorable storms.

And if you are a Deficit Hawk who likes to pretend money matters I invite you to compare the $2.5 Billion for the Curiosity program to the $23.7 Trillion we gave to the Banksters.  Even a non-rocket scientist can use a calculator to figure out that’s just barely over .0001%.

And because no frontier is final without Tiberius-

Here are some places you can stream the video commentary-

• PCMag- How to Watch the Mars Curiosity Rover Landing
• Los Angeles Times- Where you can watch Curiosity Mars landing coverage