Don’t forget that you can watch the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars LIVE (well, with 14 minutes delay, since it’s how long it takes for the images to travel from Mars to Earth). It takes 7 minutes for Curiosity to land from Mars’ atmosphere to ground so, as soon as we get the signal that Curiosity has reached Mars’ atmosphere and is about to start entry, Curiosity would have already landed — or crashed — on Mars for 7 minutes. We won’t know which until the radio signals from Curiosity on the ground reach back to Earth (which may be from 7 minutes to up to 3 days, depending on a number of scenarios that may play out). That’s the drama you can watch live on NASA TV as Curiosity lands on her own.
The coverage commentary starts at Sunday 11:30PM EDT and the actual touchdown is estimated at Moday 1:31AM EDT. (You may want to start following at Sunday midnight so as not to miss the drama.) You can also follow the landing on twitter @MarsCuriosity.
Watch Curiosity rover’s Mars landing on NASA TV (just remember to click on the LIVE button) or High Definition on UStream).
Monday 1:40AM: Curiosity has safely landed and is sending back images. I have never seen so much hugging from engineers before. What’s up with that? Congrats!
RAW images available at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/raw/
