Perseverance rover not only steers itself to a safe landing zone on Martian soil, but it sends home HD video of the trip. We’ve got the video and a celebration of the magnificent NASA accomplishment with the creator of ‘Apollo 11: What We Saw‘, Bill Whittle, and Stephen Green and Scott Ott.
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Video below hosted at Rumble.
25 replies on “Tango Delta: Perseverance Picks Martian Landing Zone, Nails It, Sends Home HD Video”
Make NASA Great Again.
Watching this brought tears to my eyes with pride in American ingenuity and innovation. There’s no limit to what we can achieve when unfettered!
My gosh, this took my breath away. I held my breath thru this whole thing. I remember watching the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was super pregnant with my daughter with my 2 year old son on my lap. I was with my husband with his best friends family that day. I felt the same way watching THIS as watching back then. Only less pregnant.
We’ve come a long way baby since I watched the initial moon landing, in living black and white. Another giant leap for mankind..
Isn’t it amazing how much fun life can be when the left shuts up and gets out of the way?
The ULTIMATE selfie would be Elon Musk in his Tesla-Mars asking Perseverance: ‘Wanna Drag?’
IF there is NO atmosphere how does the parachute work and why do they need a heat shield?
Of course there’s an atmosphere! Otherwise, the thoats wouldn’t be able to fly!
I don’t know what constitutes supersonic in the Martian atmosphere but the initial velocity reported after parachute deployment was 403 meters per second (Mps). That 1,322 feet per second (Fps) which is about the speed of a .22 long rifle bullet and certainly supersonic in Earth’s atmosphere.
Try this if you are interested enough to follow the math:
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/atmosphere/q0249.shtml
Too many unknowns for me to actually figure it out (temp, what gas is the “atmosphere” etc); but here are a couple of numbers that I remember just because we used them a lot.
Speed of sound in air at 0C is roughly 330 m/s
Speed of sound at in air 25C (room temp) approx 350 m/s
Speed of sound in He at 0C app 2.95 x’s air or 973 m/s (H2 is even higher but don’t recall that one, something less than 4x, I think)
At high altitude on Earth (>40K Ft) app 295 m/s (This one stuck because speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s)
So thinner atmosphere, but also hotter, and made up of ???.
As an aside, given the reduced gravitational constant and thinner atmosphere, be interesting to see how far that .22 would go before hitting the ground if fired level. I now have something to contemplate this evening with my Cardhu.
It would have been fun to watch Perseverance use a mechanical arm to plant a small American flag next to where it landed. Then use a mechanical arm to perform a perfect salute. Mission accomplished!
Nowadays, it would have to be a UN flag……
They probably would have been told to do that if Trump had been aware of the details of what they were planning.
Now they just have to alter the programming so that the excavator/ sampler makes 50 small star shaped holes in the ground, next to some 13 small trenches aligned to match the 13 bars.
However, if one of Musk’s devices get there first, they may just plat out a 10 mile by 10 mile area, call it Elon D.C., and start governing the whole planet. And plant a flag with the Tesla logo ??
The sad thing I think while watching this is how much this program will be retarded, or even killed, by the installation of the Buck Fiden admin., the coming deference to China and most likely transfer of this technology to them.
My thought exactly.
Will Elon Musk only prove to be the next Preston Tucker?
I wonder if a culture capable of thinking that Joe Biden is suitable for the office of the President of the United Statesand Merrick Garland is qualified to be Attorney General is ready or capable of leaving this planet.
Can we load them on a Saturn V and help them?
I am just a few years younger than Bill and was also a Space kid. My dream was to do what these kids are doing, at NASA JPL, Space-X etc. My dream was fostered by the grainy images of astronauts on the moon and amazing images of the Earth from the moon. My dream went up in smoke on January 28, 1986 watching the live feed in the Cafeteria at NASA Langley, where I was working at the time.
I can’t help but wonder how many teenagers have watched these amazing images coming back from the surface of another freaking planet and are saying to themselves, I want to be part of that! If only 1/2 of 1% of Jr HS aged kids get juiced by this, then it is worth it. This, with these images, has the potential to move kids into STEM unlike anything in the past 25 years. These images and their potential to move people’s emotions are worth the billions spent.
Godspeed, Perseverance!
“Learn to code!” I already have . For 22 years. If you don’t like math, you probably won’t like coding. If you can’t see what is wrong with telling a computer to put on shoes and socks, learn why it is a problem or find another field. ( What’s wrong? The computer would put on its shoes first, then socks. And where, precisely, did you tell the computer to put them? A sock on a doorknob would be a valid following of the instruction.) It takes a person with a certain mindset to code complex systems well. Those people are not common. Being one, I can say…. We are a bit (ok, more than a bit) demented.
Speak for yourself, Sir!
I am not demented. All who know me, tell me that I’m an ass. 🙂
Potayto, potaato. Distinction without a difference.😜
LMAO! 😀
I was taught my first computer language [BASIC] in 1970 as a HS sophomore. So 50+ years of being demented.
I studied Basic and Fortran and C (it was that long ago).
I don’t have the Coding Personality.
I hope you are not offended by this question, but do people who “learned to Code” work for Dominion? Do they own what they helped to make possible? Is that something “learning to Code” teaches you to avoid doing?
Knowing how to code does not mean you are an honest, moral person. So coders could work for Dominion. I said in other posts that I could program the ballot tabulating machines to take votes from one candidate and give them to another in one line of code. (a very long line though.) To hide it better, I would scatter the code all over the program in over 10 lines of code. Some coders would only care about the money they would get for the code. They own what they did. Coding is a skill that is unique. Any skill can be used for good or evil. But to do “good” code (code that reliably does what is desired all the time.) takes a lot of thought and planning. So does a successful bank robbery. And yes, to find the evil code takes coding knowledge. Hope this helps.