There were about 240,000 concurrent users on the web feed at touchdown. But not a single TV news channel was covering the event live that I could find.
ustream was showing an even higher number of 11.4m viewers
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NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
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Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#62There were about 240,000 concurrent users on the web feed at touchdown. But not a single TV news channel was covering the event live that I could find.
I'm not much of a sports fan. I have no "home team". Football doesn't even raise an eyebrow for me. I haven't even watched the Olympics.
But I haven't sat down for the last hour. I paced like an animal and I've just finished jumping up and down, yelling like a mad-boy.
The whole thing was so hair-brained. Giant supersonic parachutes? Blast-away heat shields? Rocket Powered Sky Cranes? It was so damn Wile E. Coyote. And they totally nailed it. I'm awestruck.
Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#63Earth wins another round of expensive hardware lobbing! Here's a humorous reminder at how difficult it is to reach other planets, especially Mars - too bad it hasn't been updated in a while.
Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#64Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#65There were about 240,000 concurrent users on the web feed at touchdown. But not a single TV news channel was covering the event live that I could find.
I think CNN covered it, but you're right, it would have been nice if it were on at least one major network.
Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#66Why can't they ever take just one horizon photo of the scenery in front of the rover instead of the typical, "looking at the ground" photos that are common with these rovers? That would have been a far better shot to show live.
They did. Front and back.
Oh, do you have a link to those photos? I must have missed them. Thanks!
Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#67To see the images from Mars:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/raw
Edit: it appears that the page has moved to http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/, discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4343891
Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#68I was at JPL when this mission was first being planned. I actually sat in on a meeting where the sky crane was first being discussed. I remember thinking to myself at the time that there was no way that it would ever work. I'm very happy to say that I was wrong. Congrats to everyone on the MSL team!
Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#69what's up with all the "what does it mean for the nation"? It's a huge step for the humanity, not only the US. And the actual rover is filled with instruments from all over the world. From wiki:
> ChemCam ... developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and French CESR
> Alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer ... APXS was developed by Canadian Space agency.
> Sample analysis at Mars ... was developed by Goddard Space flight center, the Laboratoire Inter-Universitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques (LISA) (jointly operated by France's CNRS and some Parisian universities) and Honeybee Robotics, along with many additional external partners.
> Radiation assessment detector ... was developed by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the extraterrestrial physics group at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany
> Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons ... provided by the Russian Federal Space Agency
> Rover environmental monitoring station ... provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science
Re: NASA TV feed of 10:31 pm PDT Curiosity landing
#70There were about 240,000 concurrent users on the web feed at touchdown. But not a single TV news channel was covering the event live that I could find.
CNN was covering it live with interviews with scientists etc. Coverage continues, there is a press conference in a few minutes.