So we just landed a mini cooper sized mobile laboratory on Mars

As I'm sure most of you have heard, last night at 10:32 PDT NASA landed the newest mars rover Curiosity on Mars in a low basin named Gale Crater.

Reddit.com/r/AskScience has a good list of FAQs and the comments cover a lot of things.

This is exciting on multiple levels. The most obvious and easy to wave your arms about and say "HEY WASN'T THIS COOL!?" is that MSL weighs a ton (literally), and achieved the equivalent of landing a hole in one from 154 million miles away using a putter instead of a driving club. Not to mention the insane sky crane maneuver used to safely land this big hunk of science.

I work at JPL. I don't work on this particular project, but every employee knows a good deal about it as it's been super hyped up on lab.
So if you have any immediate questions and you don't want to go looking through the thread linked above, or you want an insight into what's been going on at JPL in the past week, go ahead and leave a question here and I'll answer.

Picture I took last thursday of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Odyssey, and Spirit and Opportunity: https://imgur.com/SzIVp

Badd Ass is all I gotta say.

I need to read up on it, I assume that faqs goes over the mission objectives, making of, etc?

AtrumX wrote:I need to read up on it, I assume that faqs goes over the mission objectives, making of, etc?

Yeah, the FAQs on that page I linked go over a pretty good chunk of common questions

i watch it live on my 360 so great

yeah, I'm a geek for this kind of stuff and science in general so it was pretty sweet for me to watch.

btw, cool fact:
I worked for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. for a few years so I felt like a member of that mission eventhough I worked there as a computer scientist, not one of the hands on engineers. Still way cool!!

This is a really cool achievement. Sounds like a pretty cool job there Vision!