This is cool, awesome and scary (can it actually work?):
Find out why NASA engineers call the upcoming Mars landing "Seven Minutes of Terror"
Stop what you're doing and watch this. Invite whoever you're with to watch it, too. In just 44 days, NASA will attempt the most amazing planetary landing in the history of space exploration. It's a plan so remarkable, so technically impressive, so very different from anything ever attempted, that even the Agency's engineers have been known to call it crazy. Not because they don't believe in its design, but because it is that mind-numbingly awesome.
Is there Lori? There should be Lori.
I can't get away with watching video at work--spoil me.
Well, it uses a heat-shield to enter Mars's atmosphere. Then it deploys a supersonic parachute and drops the heat-shield. Once it slows to 200 mph, it drops the parachute and uses retrorockets to slow to a hover over the landing site. Then the skycrane (the part with the retro-rockets) lowers the rover part on a tether onto the surface of Mars. Once the rover is on the surface, the tether is cut and the skycrane flies away so it won't crash onto the rover.
A million things have to go right for it to work, and since Mars will be 14 light-minutes away from Earth, the whole thing is automated.
But where does the skycrane go? I need closure.
I could be really annoying today. I can't tell. But I'm sassing
everyone,
including the CIO's admin and managers and shit. So far, so good. At least to my face.
I have one more on site thing I said I'd do today, and I'm about to say fuck it for the week. I just pulled off the uber-productive 15 minute meeting, and I kinda just want to coast on how badly it was totally going to go (the silent developer not just unprepared, but she had all the wrong facts, when she offered up any at all--thankfully I quizzed her beforehand, so I stopped her talking in front of upper management) and didn't. She said she'd send me chocolates if I wrote the support tickets for her, and I totally did.
Okay, the Indian guys are saying lots of words in language-ita !-doesn't-speak, and also "pineapple fried rice" and "hospitalised" and "medical emergency".
Good to know everyone's knuckling down and getting work done in the waning hours of the week. Creepy guy was just at my desk telling me to go home--does he want to follow me? What is in it for him...
They have a computer generated video showing what is supposed to happen, and it is AWESOME. My husband goes into cackles of geekiness.
But where does the skycrane go?
Having fulfilled its destiny, it flies off a mile or two away and crashes.
Trust me--it's OK. Kinda' like how spiders and salmon die after they give birth.
They have a computer generated video showing what is supposed to happen, and it is AWESOME. My husband goes into cackles of geekiness.
Yeah. It'll be landing after midnight Central time. I'll be watching the updates.
Oh, man, I'll be off in the mountains when this happens. Feh.
See, this is the shit I get myself into. No co-worker is supposed to email me and tell me I'm pretty and ask if I'm single. I don't even make those jokes with your colleague that's hot and has the accent. It's completely off limits for everyone.
And I swear, of all the shit I've been pulling today, I totally did not predictably set myself up for that.
Timelies all!
As usual, I have Nova on my lap. I'm just waiting for her to go after my earrings.
