back to article Old-timer Odyssey to babysit Curiosity's Mars landing

NASA has managed to nudge veteran spacecraft Odyssey, which has been orbiting Mars since October 2001 – into a better position to pick up communications from rover Curiosity as it lands on Mars on 5 August. NASA's Mars orbiter Odyssey Mars orbiter Odyssey . Credit: NASA/JPL The space agency had been a tad concerned that it …

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  1. Aaron Em

    Say what you like about NASA --

    and there's plenty to say! -- they still have some of the best engineers on any planet we know about.

  2. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge
    Alien

    Is there an alien comms links ...... for interplanetary chatter/IP XSSXXXXChange?

    Sounds like a good plan ..... nice and simply complex.

  3. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
    Alien

    arrival at 06.31 BST on 6 August (22.31 PDT 5 August).

    What's that in local time?

    1. Darryl

      Re: arrival at 06.31 BST on 6 August (22.31 PDT 5 August).

      Depends which Martian time zone you live in, I guess

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        CST

        Cydonia Standard Time is the usual one...

        1. Graham Marsden
          Black Helicopters

          Re: CST

          I would have suggested Syria Planum, but then you'd know I was located at the secret Psi Corps base...

      2. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
        Thumb Down

        Re: arrival at 06.31 BST on 6 August (22.31 PDT 5 August).

        > Depends which Martian time zone you live in, I guess

        Well, no. It depends on which Martian timezone Curiosity will be landing in. That's why I asked.

    2. ravenviz Silver badge
      Alien

      Re: arrival at 06.31 BST on 6 August (22.31 PDT 5 August).

      They've only gone and closed all the canali in the region so I can't get to the shops or anything!

  4. TRT Silver badge
    Alien

    Wait a minute. What's that?

    A green flare... some sort of mist.

    1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

      Re: Wait a minute. What's that?

      What are the chances of that, eh?

      1. Caltharian

        Re: Wait a minute. What's that?

        About a million to one......

        1. Colin Miller

          Re: Wait a minute. What's that?

          ... which has about 9/10 chance of actually occurring, according to the laws of narrative causality.

        2. This post has been deleted by its author

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Wait a minute. What's that?

          Colin, the correct answer was:-

          ".... But still they come!"

          1. TRT Silver badge

            Re: Wait a minute. What's that?

            The top of the cylinder unscrewed slowly and a creature, the size of a bear but beset with tentacles emerged. A quivering, unearthly hiss emanated from it's leathery lips "Phear us, Earthmen, for we have returned and this time we have Penicillin; mwahahahaha!"

            I turned and ran, as fast as I could, at first not knowing where I was going, just allowing myself to be swept along by the stampeding mass of humanity. The,n my senses returning, I fought my way sideways through the press of fleeing man, my destination clear; the hospital at Maidstone where I knew I would find a weapon capable of eliminating the alien horror that had descended.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Wait a minute. What's that?

              And I found the weapon, a nurse's vibrator of eye watering proportions. Unleashing its might, I laid low each alien in turn, with the Revenge of the Anal Probe...

        4. hplasm
          Coat

          Re: About a million to one......

          That's what *they* said...

          1. TRT Silver badge

            Re: About a million to one......

            Actually, I was going for MRSA, but you can play with your vibrator if you want.

            1. Mister_C
              Joke

              Re: About a million to one......

              You can kill them with anagrams of the homeworld? Let's hope they don't say HEART to us.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: About a million to one......

              Yes, had guess that (or c diff - much more difficult to sterilise without resorting to chlorine releasing stuff, etc). But then vibrators & nurses are a lot more fun to joke about...

  5. MahFL22
    Go

    Not Talk, Listen.

    JPL won't be talking to Curiosity as she attempts to land, what Odyssey will do is use a bent pipe relay to send the event tones TO Earth as the landing occurs fully automatically.

    1. hplasm
      Alien

      Re: Bent pipe...event tones?

      OOOOOOOLaaaaaaaaa!

  6. Hollerith 1

    When I consider the human race

    Too often the human race is all too simian: brutish, cruel, thinking only of stuffing ourselves and fighting for territory or a higher rung on the ladder, superstitious, eager to be stupid, and I think: let us die out. And then we reach delicately across vast empty spaces to turn and drop our frail little constructed bits of metal onto a place that, to our eyes, is a small dot in the night sky, and I think how wonderful, how marvellous our brains are, how glorious is rationality and curiosity. Much can be forgiven such a species.

    1. techfreak
      Alert

      Re: When I consider the human race

      Who are you, really?

      1. hplasm
        Pint

        Re: Who are you, really?

        Hopefully, the future.

        1. Roger Greenwood
          Pint

          Re: Who are you, really?

          "Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929) was an American statistician who developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of one of the companies that later merged and became IBM."

          Well you asked.

  7. TheRealRoland

    the skeptic in me

    Reads this as 'we're damn lucky we still have this old brick flying around, and we're damn lucky we got it back in order. Otherwise we would really be in the dark...'

    Forgot the sequence in events - was ussing odyssey as a relay always part of the plan? Wasn't there some course change applied to the lander so that it would land inside the crater / closer to the crater?

    Ah well, still thumbs up to Nasa for pulling this off.

    7 minutes of terror, relay satellite almost broken, what else can go wrong now ;-)

  8. Gordon 10
    Trollface

    Does oddyssey have a camera?

    How else are we gonna get a picture of the mushroom cloud that starts an interstellar war as our "sky crane" lander goes titsup?

  9. Martin Budden Silver badge

    martian space junk?

    I know there are huge numbers of man-made items orbiting Earth, I wonder how much space junk we've put into martian orbit so far? (Not trying to detract from technical achievements, just curious)

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I never passed maths at high school

    I'm so glad someone did.

    1. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

      Re: I never passed maths at high school

      Maths passed me but I would have stayed with GMT and got the thing there earlier.

      Would have saved a shed load of fuel for the future.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    what? has no one else groked the first problem?

    so why did odyssey enter safe mode in the first place? and furthermore, why/how did the thrust boost bring it back online from safe mode?? was this just a darkness problem??

    1. micheal
      Joke

      Re: what? has no one else groked the first problem?

      Someone on earth sent CTRL-ALT-DEL and windows 2000 home premium rebooted itself , the booster shock wiggled the ram chips and reseated them

      1. Richard Laval

        Re: what? has no one else groked the first problem?

        Given how long Odyssey has been out there I suspect it was Windows ME, which would explain the safe mode.

    2. Norman Hartnell

      Re: what? has no one else groked the first problem?

      It did an unusually short burn for orbit correction (1.5 secs) and one of the reaction wheels wasn't happy with trying to maintain attitude, so Odyssey entered safe mode as precaution. This correction was 6 secs and it was able to maintain attitude successfully, so I presume it is OK now.

  12. Mako

    "...on 11 July, NASA stalwart Odyssey entered safe mode..."

    ...so the first pictures it relays back will be stepped down to 8-bit VGA."

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