I watched the whole Curiosity landing live on a couple different video feeds, with and without commentary. I turned down the commentary for most of the “7 minutes of terror”… just wanted to hear the control room raw.
Given the complexity of this landing, and all the many many places where something could have gone wrong, I was fully expecting for something to fail. But so far it looks like the landing was pretty much perfect*. That is just incredible. Amazing job by everybody involved, who have worked for many years to make this happen.
* Although we won’t know for sure until everything gets woken up and tested over the next few days.
Yes – incredible and wonderful!
Nice parachute picture later too!
From JH via Facebook:
I’m amazed at the ability of this team to successfully and accurately do this despite never having been able to test the system in the Martian environment (and it being done completely automatically with a 30 light minute round trip communications distance). It’s a monument to the triumph of science and engineering.
21 hours ago
From SM via Facebook:
Indeed. I am amazed that absolutely everything went right. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, but it all just came together.
2 seconds ago