https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive
We’re at 8 hours to launch!
Coverage at 7am Eastern / 4am Pacific.
I’ve managed to terraform, Mars in a few tens of hours in Surviving Mars , I bet the doubters didn’t think we could have phones we could use to call spaceships in our pockets or talk to computers in the future when you watched Star Trek…
It will happen someday.
One of my favorite ideas for terraforming Venus goes by the relatively anodyne name ‘lithosphere overturn’. Expose enough fresh rock to the atmosphere, and it forms carbonates.
The only problem is that the amount of rock required is the entire surface of Venus, down to a depth of one kilometer.
Yea!!!
Launch video here (at 1:07:15):
What I can’t find any information at all about is the launch profile. Did it launch directly into Mars transfer? Literally nowhere describes this.
Edit: My timing was off:
After Atlas V booster shutdown and separation, the single engine Centaur upper stage completed the task of hauling Perseverance into its initial Earth parking orbit of 167 x 250 km with a 29.1 degree inclination.
Following a coast period, the Centaur’s engine re-ignited 45 minutes after liftoff to perform the Trans Mars Injection burn.
The approximately 8 minute long burn was designed to place the payload and Centaur upper stage into a heliocentric (Sun) orbit that almost perfectly intercepts Mars in February 2021. Almost perfectly, but not quite — as the Trans Mars Injection burn is designed so the Centaur actually misses Mars when it flies by.
The burn into trans-Mars trajectory was successful, and they’ve established a connection (with a couple of hiccups) between the spacecraft and the deep space network.
Maybe we can build an atmosphere shield around the planet like in Spaceballs? It won’t protect us from Mega Maid tho!
Very cool article!
That’s interesting. Maybe we could do that and test the “Giant Impact” theory of how we got our moon at the same time. If we could tow Mercury over to Venus, or maybe one of Jupiter’s bigger moons, and drop it on Venus, that would probably kick up a kilometer or so of rock, and maybe Venus could get its own moon out of the experiment. Pity about the Venusian lead-breathing fungi colonies, but you can’t make an omelette without cracking a planet.
Many years ago I ran a Champions campaign where Venusians landed on a remote Pacific island to start up a project to Venusiform Earth. Of course, we’re doing it for them these days, and it can’t be stopped by just summoning a random group of superheroes to go stomp on the Venusians.
My favorite of that campaign, though, was poking fun at military “CentCom”-style abbreviations - for the made-up Naval Intelligence Command, Polynesian Operations. Every time the players checked in with them, the phone was directed to “Rear Admiral B. Anderson Doyle, NInComPoOp”
Son, I knew Rear Admiral BAD, and you, sir, are NO Rear Admiral BAD!
We saw the SpaceX Crew Dragon DM-2 with the International Space Station trailing close behind pass directly overhead last night. Splashdown is scheduled for 2:48 pm eastern off Pensacola.
According to the LA Times The splashdown will mark the first time in 45 years that astronauts have returned from space via an ocean landing.
The last such landing came in July 1975, when an Apollo capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program mission.
Splashdown is less than two hours. Weather and sea conditions are just about perfect:
Congrats to SpaceX on a flawless mission. America finally back to launching it’s own Astronauts again. Been to long.
Smart girl.
Didn’t take long for the idiots to show up:
It’s Florida.
Yeah. No Trump people anywhere else, right?
Oops! I didn’t see the banner.