{"id":381,"date":"2012-08-05T23:12:17","date_gmt":"2012-08-06T06:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/05\/curiosity-has-landed\/"},"modified":"2012-08-05T23:34:41","modified_gmt":"2012-08-06T06:34:41","slug":"curiosity-has-landed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/05\/curiosity-has-landed\/","title":{"rendered":"Curiosity has landed!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>NASA and JPL successfully landed the Curiosity vehicle on Mars this evening.  What an amazing landing!  It started with a heat shield slowing it down in the atmosphere, then progressed to a parachute, and finished with a soft rocket landing with the rover suspended from a cable.  See the video for a neat <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=P4boyXQuUIw\"> animation<\/a> of the full process.  When I first saw the animation I thought, &#8220;No way will they pull this off!&#8221;  It looked too complex with too many things that could go wrong.<\/p>\n<p>The landing was not visible, but on NASA TV I watched the control room at JPL in Pasadena as they monitored the descent.  The room exploded into cheers, hugs and tears as it was confirmed that it was safely down.  A couple of low resolution pictures came through before the relay satellite moved out of range.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not quite as impressive as the moon landings, but it is an amazing technological feat, as are the capabilities of the vehicle itself, a complex chemistry and geology lab on wheels.  It&#8217;s about the size of a Chevy Volt.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m looking forward to seeing some high resolution images, probably as early as tomorrow morning.<\/p>\n<p>More info <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/mars\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA and JPL successfully landed the Curiosity vehicle on Mars this evening. What an amazing landing! It started with a heat shield slowing it down in the atmosphere, then progressed to a parachute, and finished with a soft rocket landing with the rover suspended from a cable. See the video for a neat animation of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}