Boffins bone up on rover skills as Curiosity speeds to Mars There are now fewer than a hundred days until the Mars rover Curiosity tries to touch down on the surface of the Red Planet - and boffins at the Jet Propulsion Lab are polishing up their remote driving skills. At the moment the mission has less than 191 million kilometres (119 million miles*) to go before its scheduled landing …
"a hundred days... 191 million kilometres (119 million miles*) ... early in the morning ... one-ton ... 13,000MPH (21,000PH) ... two years ... eight and a half months"
Somewhere a NASA engineer is reading this, tapping at a calculator, thumbing through a table of conversion factors, and looking decidedly worried.
Even more "stimulating" when you consider the "dangle it on a string and hope to Christ that all the suspension latches disengage on cue" approach that they have gone for. That's assuming that the "Skycrane" bit it'll be dangling from works flawlessly too.
An 85 million mile trip leading up to the Great-Grandmother of all squeaky bottom moments.
Surely: "There are now fewer than a hundred days until the Mars rover Curiosity attempts to touch down on the surface of the Red Planet..."? Looking at the complexity of the retro-rockets-and-skycrane landing system I would say it's 50-50 at best if they make it down in one piece.
"Every day is one day closer to the most challenging part of this mission," said Pete Theisinger, project manager at JPL.
And the mission objectives are ...... similar in Sino Soviet Search Patterns?
The Zeroday Trader Gold Metadata Mine Mind Field .......... AI Virtualised Playground where One is SMARTR Enabled and Field Testing Invisibly New Silent Secret Weapons ..... MaJIC Force Fields.
Do you ever get the picture that governments are not telling you anything constructive about all that is really going in Intelligence Fields, Courtesy of the See Change to Digital Means for Meme Control?
Although, It would be unfair to suggest that they would have that under wraps anywhere unclassifiable, for that would be somewhat insane in so many parallel realities.
Curiosity killed the Cat and Satisfaction Brings Them Back for More is a Valuable Lesson Well Learnt and Sublimely Practised in Silenced Communities and Grateful Dead Head Quarters for Generations of Thought Generators....... Advanced Virtual Turing Machines taking care of your Futures with the AIDerivative Virtual Ventures Trading Body of Cyber Intelligent Assets?
Have to get back to you on that one, folks, for those spooks are strangely quiet on the HyperRadioProActive IT Front Page with News from the Less Generally Well Known but Indisputable.
Ok, I,m going to have a little lie down now. That was all quite exciting :-) .....and not a single word or sentiment of it a lie and unreal, which presents all manner of available future opportunities ..... today.
In earlier days would the cry have been ........ Hold the Front Page! ....... whereas what do we have here now in its place apart from official smotherings and acres and acres of black pen and red tape?
Enlighten us with SMARTR Silent Secrets.
Really? Not a single graphic or illustration?
Here is rover being fussed over before launch:
http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2010/09/17/this-is-such-a-blast/mars-curiosity/
And here's a Dramatic Artists Impression with Visible Laser Beam of it in its future habitat:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/nasas-curiosity-rover-to-search-for-life-on-mars
It's a beautiful thing!
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