Come For The Landing

Science 56 Comments

Stay for the earth shattering kaboom!

Update. Why do today’s chattering science heads talk to their audience as though we’re all 9 year olds?

Successful landing! Good job.

h/t Nancy Ross

56 Replies to “Come For The Landing”

      1. Oh, Kate, so you got caught off your game over one ingrained cliche. It’s not like you haven’t atoned for that many times over by the righteous set of bywords created by you. Libranos comes to mind, hear my praise.
        You ROCK through all the hard places.
        Excuse me, I had a few drinks and am waxing a wee bit too effusive, but true.

  4. Thank you for the link Kate.

    The rover is expected to touch down at approximately 3:55 PM Eastern time, so for those interested it is probably wise to tune in an hour or so before that time. Speaking as an engineer these rover landings on distant planets always impress me.

    This will be a pleasant distraction from endless woke idiots, biased media, virus hysteria, Trudeau’s stupidity, and other assorted nonsense that we are bombarded with daily.

    Perseverance will be looking for signs of early life on Mars. The theory is that Mars might have once supported life.

  5. the video the other day showed it was entirely done by millennials of colour and most female . hope its not leading to another bridge failure

    1. Woke is in and NASA doesn’t want to miss out.

      The project is headed up by John McNamee, a NASA old timer who knows what he is doing. He is not prominently featured because he wouldn’t fit the woke narrative.

      Such are the crazy times we live in.

    2. I miss the times when Walter Cronkite (yes, I know he was a leftie) provided commentary and Jack King made the earlier Apollo launch announcements:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3QpeI0kEMQ

      King made the countdowns exciting and, listening to him, one knew one was watching history in the making. That’s not surprising as he had a background as a radio announcer.

      The soyboys in charge now make the Mars landing less thrilling than watching paint dry.

    1. I was waiting for some little green man peering in through the window with a sign…Kilroy was here.

      1. Or, “For a good time on Mars, drop in at Eccentrica Galumbits’s Pleasure Palace, just off the south slope of Olympus Mons”

    1. Apparently, the various stages of the descent will be televised if, for no other reason, than to provide information for subsequent engineering analysis.

  9. Don’t ever compare these scientists to the covid political scientists, climatologists or various other pseudoscience rent seekers.
    There are direct consequences to their calculations and decisions. Crashing billion dollar spacecraft tends to get noticed.
    Unlike the charlatans above, there is an irrefutable quantitative link to the qualitative goal of landing Perseverance and its mission.
    No such requirement for the woke of systemic discrimination, government created jobs and beyond ignorant 3rd wave hobgoblins.
    Imho, they should have sent the leading journalists with the mission to take close up photos and give us real time reporting.
    Unlike the dirt Perseverance will collect on Mars, there would be no need to return the journalists to Earth. (bad humour alert)

  10. Excuse me … but what does having a “diverse” … “international” team have to do with designing a vehicle to land on Mars?

    NASA has promised they will “learn lessons” if the landing goes up in Mars dust. Huh? Will those lessons include learning to hire the best and the brightest … even if they’re all white people? Or all Asians? That’s what Silicon Valley has done. Nothing but whites and Asians. And they seem to “land” everything they do these days.

    And why hasn’t NASA “learned” anything from their FAILED climate models and fudged temperatures? According to NASA … every single new day is the HOTTEST day ever in the history of the world.

  11. Cheering and screaming … in a confined space!? Ohhhhhhh mo’mmmmmmaaaaa … get ready for a spike in NASA deaths … and cases. Right?

    They scolded us NOT to cheer during the Super Bowl. That was “science”, wasn’t it? You’d think the “scientists” would know better

  12. 15:58 hrs EST

    YAY! TOUCHDOWN!
    Perseverance Rover has landed safely!
    Images from Mars now appearing.

  13. This an international crime. Where is the lander’s mask? The Chi-coms spread it around the globe, so now the US one ups them and spreads it around the solar system? Oh! The hunmanity!!

    1. Perseverance is definitely social distancing. Then again, so are we but still have to wear a mask, so I see you point. LOL.

  16. Ok. If they can transmit info that fast from Mars to earth in real time…why is my internet so poor?

    1. There was only one router involved between Mars and here.

      Or maybe NASA just wasn’t cheap and paid its bills :^)

    2. They didn’t. By 20 minutes before landing mission control were essentially spectators. They don’t receive the signal until after a light speed delay.

  17. “Why do today’s chattering science heads talk to their audience as though we’re all 9 year olds?”

    Down here, we just elected Joe Biden.

    I’d say they’re talking to us appropriately.

    1. Didn’t you know? It’s all for and about the children…. to get them into STEMy type careers.

      The rover name was picked through a school competition. Perserverance? Really? Was that the best they could do? I miss the days when spacecraft had names Ranger or Mariner.

      1. I find all the names nauseating examples of bureaucratic blandness.

        Opportunity, Curiosity. etc..

        Why not memorable, distinctive names: Marsy McMarsface, Wheely the Mars Crusher, Werner von Brauns Bastard Child.

        1. NASA came close to that many years ago. You may remember the Mars Pathfinder mission from mid-1997. The rover that was on board was named Sojourner, in honour of abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

  18. I read the rover is nuclear powered instead of solar this time. I thought solar was “in” and nuclear was “out”?

  19. As Tom sang, bacteria is considered life on Mars, but a beating heart on Earth isn’t…

    weird.

  20. Hooray. It’s 1976 and Joe can still get an erection and remember what city he’s in.

    Mars is a howling desert with no liquid water. What little atmosphere it has is unbreathable. The soil is poisonous. It will never be fit for human habitation. There is nothing there worth traveling that far to find.

    Moonshots, Venusshots and Marsshots only ever made sense as propaganda of communist states and to immensely rich people who dream of living in utopian socialist communities in outer space, waited on hand and foot by robotic slaves, while the proles waited for extinction on a dying Earth—pipe dreams they should have abandoned when they outgrew the comic books they found them in.

    Why bother with other planets? Because it will take several Earths’ worth of resources to allow China to reach a western living standard? Long before that the Chinese will have hauled your miserable selves off to prison camps, to wait for extinction in slavery that will make antebellum Dixie look like paradise. Better you than them, is their attitude. World’s not big enough for us both.

    If you have the wit and industry to figure out how to send a rocket to Mars, you have the wit and industry to solve real problems.

    If you want to save mankind, save the only planet we can live on.

    If you’re serious about that, slay the dragon. Even Elon Musk can’t run from him forever.

  21. I watched it, great stuff. I’m looking forward to animated real-time footage of the descent. I used to do space hardware; very interesting but very bureaucratic, maybe less so in the US. NASA cerainly was a derilict drifting bureaucratic hulk before Trump got it re-focused on Space, instead of making muslims feel good and stuffing the numbers to prove global warming. Today was not a computer simulation.

    1. I used to do space hardware

      So did I, but that was a long time ago, back in the Jurassic Era….. The closest I come to that now is getting on an amateur radio satellite with my station.

  22. It’s another great accomplishment…..did you notice that many of those really smart scientists and engineers were wearing two masks?

    1. Sure, until the landing was successful and all the social distancing dictates were forgotten. Don’t blame them either.

    1. Heh, good one! I was thinking Baffin, but you never know when a local will show up. Would have been a hoot if someone waved to the B&W camera from outside, just after switching it on.

      ‘

  27. Maybe I’m missing something but………..

    Mars has virtually no atmosphere (OK, .6% of Earth’s). No atmosphere, no sound. Nitpickers will say there is some sound. Yes, that’s true but it is a moot (mute?) point.

    And those little gyrocopters? I don’t think so (for the same reason – no atmosphere).

    1. There is more than a trace of an atmosphere which should allow the transmission of sound, as it’s a compressive wave. Just how much that’s possible remains to be seen.

      As far as the helicopter is concerned, the rotor blades need to move fast enough to generate lift. Again, how much that would be needs to be determined.

      Even if no sound is detected or the helicopter doesn’t fly, those experiments will still be successful as they will provide data for any subsequent attempts to do the same thing.

      I’m reminded of when the press derided Thomas Edison in trying to make a light bulb to work. He was portrayed as having failed about a thousand times. His response, quite correctly, was that he didn’t fail–he found a thousand ways that weren’t suitable.

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