Tonight’s the night folks.
NASA’s 1-ton Curiosity rover is set to land inside the Red Planet’s Gale Crater at 10:31 p.m. PDT tonight (Aug. 5; 1:31 a.m. EDT and 0531 GMT on Aug. 6). As with any planetary landing, success is not a given, and tensions may be especially high tonight given Curiosity’s elaborate, unprecedented landing sequence.
via Mars Rover's Nerve-Wracking Landing Just Hours Away | Space.com.
So, as I type this, that’s about 3 hours away… Keeping my fingers crossed. Last time I did a comparison of successful to failed Mars missions, it was very close to 50% 35%. Mars is a very tricky place to land a spaceship. There is just enough atmosphere to force you to deal with it, but not enough to cushion the landing through air braking. A real problem.
1 user commented in " Mars Rover lands tonight "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI had mis-remembered how poorly earth’s attempts to reach Mars have been. Instead of a 50% success rate, missions to Mars from earth have actually been less successful. out of 39 attempts, 15 have been successful. Well, now it’s 16 out of 40. Presumably. So far anyway.
The US success rate is much higher than the overall success rate, something like 75%. Which means the rest of the world is something like 3 out of 20 or something ridiculous. I guess NASA deserves some credit for their successes on Mars.
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