When I saw this on the news, all I could think of were NASA scientists playing Lunar Lander in preparation for this ^^
It's interesting that you said "NASA scientists". Personally, I would have to give credit to the NASA engineers for putting Curiosity safely on the surface. I'm not being facetious or anything, I'm just pointing out how interesting it is that someone said scientists when I would have said engineers Undoubtedly though, whichever way you look at it, there are some extremely excited NASA scientists who can't wait to ge their hands on the controls for that one ton marvel and start exploring
But the work that those engineers did would have been based, ultimately, on the work done by scientists Although the entry/descent/landing systems on Curiosity were completely autonomous, so technically it landed itself safely on the surface . And, agreed. It'll be a few weeks before it starts actually moving about, but it can still carry out experiments while stationary. I can't wait until the antennas are up properly and we're getting regular data back from the rover. Especially the high quality images; even the MARDI camera was shooting at 1600x1200 resolution, which is a phenomenal resolution for a descent camera. The specs for MAHLI are mind-boggling: "a resolution as high as 14.5 micrometers per pixel" - 14.5 micrometers per pixel, ffs!
Using MRO to relay data back to Earth from MSL they can get speeds of up to 2meg per second I can barely get a damn phone signal in my house!
lol! Just like Elton playing BF3 then huh Here's another fun image Rover, heat shield, back shell+parachute and descent vehicle all in one shot. The heat shield is about 1200m from Curiosity and the descent vehicle and back shell are around 650m and 615m respectively
I need to catch up on the latest news; planned to watch the news conference today, but I've had a few minecraft server problems to fix...!
In this kind of project I think the line between scientist and engineer is totally blurred. Every team will have both in spades, even without considering that they're both. I'm loving the raw image data coming out, I can tell that's going to be a staple over the next few months - checking the new images every day.
NASA made that distinction. I watched a press conference on Monday afternoon in which one of the mission directors (not sure if that's the correct title?) said that there are around 300 excited engineers and 400 equally excited scientists. It may have been 400 engineers and 300 scientists - I forget. Though you can look at engineering as being a practical application of science, and in that case it's all the same thing .
At least no one has called them Boffins, How I hate that term when applied to real people doing real science.
I've got nothing remotely intelligent or constructive to add, but stuff like this makes me realise that I made some bad decisions at school/uni. I would love to be involved in stuff like this.
The Register frequently does; although, as with many things on El Reg, it's done with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Actually to be fair to The Register, they've got a reporter over there at the moment (was rather surprised to see him in one of the press conferences) and his coverage of Curiosity has been pretty damn good.
I couldn't give a toss about slang terms, it's only when they make unintentional mix-ups that it gets to me. If someone called me a Boffin while I was applying science, I'd be quite chuffed.
I really need to start keeping up to date with this... I was all over the launch, but sadly real life has taken over since then!
Full resolution image of the heat shield just after separation Can't wait for the full video/gif at this res!
+1 to this. Real life sucks, doesn't it? Sitting in front of my TV and computer watching this stuff has been the most exciting thing I've done all week, I should have kept on doing it instead of all the other boring stuff I've been up to Those high resolution images are amazing!
