May 25, 2008

Phoenix Landing Tonight

You can watch the Phoenix Mars Lander touch down live tonight online.  Pretty cool.  The Phoenix also has a blog.

Anecdote:  A few years back I was at a dinner party with an engineer who worked at JPL on the Rover projects.  He said that the atmosphere in the control room during landing is a combination of watching your child being born and watching him play as the starting pitcher in Game 7 of the World Series all rolled into one.  With a lot of smoking. 

1 comment:

scott cunningham said...

I know, this is really cool. I was trying to find a way to embed that artistic video of the landing just before I clicked on your blog (but can't figure it out).

That's a funny story, though. That kind of work sounds really unique. They work and work for who knows how many hundreds if not thousands of hours, all to wait and see what happens in under 15 minutes. How stressful that must be.

Blog Archive