Am I The Only One Excited About Curiosity!?

link...

yeah... it's amazing.... wasn't even broadcast on tele... watched the live stream on the net...

it's surprising how blase we have become at such significant and exciting achievements....

I remember being glued to the tv watching the moon landing, I was home sick with whooping cough at the time.. and was able to watch days of the televised landing and surrounding events... was a privilege... now something like this...really hasn't been given enough accolades...  have we become so jaded by sci fi movies and cgi effects that the real thing doesn't warrant the same excitement anymore.... 

I didn't stay up to catch it live but it was damned amazing.  Here's a video from the Curiosity rover during final descent; some pics taken by the rover after the dust settled are there, too.  Among the most incredible things was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter catching a photo of it about 60 seconds before touchdown.  Not sure if it was planned for it to be in position or a coincidence, but amazing either way.

Probably the only one who felt the need to SHOUT.

Edited out the 'volume'.....;p

I couldn't sleep...it was driving me crazy waiting to hear.

I told my teen aged son tonight how they got it there and what it could do and he said, "I didn't think stuff like that was actually real now.".

Then I told him in three years we have a craft flying by Pluto and he was literally speechless.

it was a civilised 3-30pm'ish here...  Australia's Tidbinbilla played a key role in communications and transmitted the first photos   link..    

nice to have the occassional thing timed so you don't have to wait up in the middle of the night for it, so often it's the reverse... 

Certainly not!  https://forums.wincustomize.com/429063

a capture of the landing...   link...   

NASA has an X-box app for live streaming and the lander has it's own Twitter account where it posts "in character".

No, you are not.

One small step closer to not having all our eggs in one basket.

Amen brother.

I grew up in the 6p0's where we had the constant dystopian vision of the world overcrowded and polluted with no chance to survive unless we all started eating leaves, wearing loin cloths and letting predators and disease kill all of us.

To me, a bigger concern is that we are depleting wildlife and plant habitats at tremendous rates and not doing anything to preserve the gene pool of the species we're pushing out of existence. If we "break the system" we may never be able to reintroduce what's needed to bring it back.

As the world gets more industrially developed, the "reserves" that existed in undeveloped countries start to vanish as they consume them for growth.  If we keep going like we are, eventually we may run out of enough landmass to allow biodiversity to keep working.

My wife and I were up most of the night here waiting for news. It was and still is amazing! My wife's sister found out last night that we had a space station in orbit ... she thought it only happened in the movies. To say the least, I was shocked ... still am shocked, by how much people just assume is 'only in the movies' and then they go "You're trying to pull a joke over on me right?" when you tell them all the crazy stuff we have out there. I mean, we have stuff orbiting the sun to give advanced warning about solar flares, we've already flown stuff to, into, and around asteroids, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, everywhere ... heck we even have one of the original Voyager craft about ready to leave the boundaries of our solar system!!!

Just blows me away how little people know or even seem to care in general. It's astonishing. Had someone ask me today at work in all seriousness if the 'mars rover deal was real or if that was just a pr stunt for NASA' ... really?

My own son didn't realize that we actually sent ships to other planets since the moon landing.  When I told him Pluto was next he didn't know what to say.

Well...

This thread actually reminds me of fishing!

I have lived on the East Coast of Australia most of my life and have been a keen fisherman for over 30 years.

There is supposedly a type of fish called a 'kingfish' that lives here and which i will commonly see people catching on TV shows.

The interesting thing here is that in all my years of fishing, not only have i never caught a 'kingfish' but i have never seen anyone else catch one, nor have i ever seen anyone carrying one or unloading one from a boat, or even seen a dead one on the beach or even a head left behind at the fish cleaning tables. Not only that, but i have discovered in conversation with friends, who fish, that this is the same for them too!! As far as i know this fish is about as real as the dinosaurs on Jurassic park! The fish do not exist in my reality or the reality of any people i know, so it is of little or no interest for me to watch people catching Kingfish on TV, i will say "oh there catching Kingfish, change the channel".

The point is that we are all so used to seeing things that are not real on tv, that the line between what is not real and what is not real 'to us' in our own lives starts to become blurred, and so things like the curiosity landing can actually manage to be uninteresting to people.

He 'could' have told you Pluto wasn't a planet ..... JAFOCHECK

That too may change. Recently another moon was discovered orbiting Pluto. That brings the total to five......Pluto has five moons dancing around with it in the deep dark. Astronomers are thinking reclassifying Pluto as a non-planet was a bit premature simply because only 'planets' are supposed to have moons. Most likely Pluto will be reclassified as a dwarf planet. Why they even changed it is beyond me. Dum dums!

Planet ftw!

Pluto already is classified as a dwarf planet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Classification. If Pluto was again reclassified as a planet, we'd gain another couple planets as well. The dwarf planet Eris is actually larger than Pluto, and orbits much farther out. There's also a handful of other objects past Neptune that would also probably have to be considered planets if Pluto is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune

Also, the ability or lack-there-of of an object to have moons is irrelevant to whether it is a planet or not. Mercury and Venus of course have no moons, but are very clearly planets. There are a number of asteroids in the asteroid belt that have moons of their own http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor-planet_moon

Don't forget about the other poor rocks that were planets but were reclassified in the 19th century: Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and Juno!

To be fair, they were all discovered in the early 1800s before the concept of an "asteroid" had come about. In the 1850s when a lot of these "planets" were being discovered, astronomers realized that classifying them as such was wrong and they were subsequently known as asteroids.

I know how you can tell a planet from an asteroid - when one comes on a collision course with Earth, see if Bruce Willis flies his spaceship towards it carrying bombs, or away from it carrying virgins! If the latter happens, you know it's a planet!!!

Let the conspiracy theories begin!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2185737/Internet-conspiracy-theories-begin-mystery-blotch-appears-Mars-rover-photo--disappears-hours-later.html

The space Ponies have been there and partied and left already!

It is the pictures the 'don't' give us you should worry about!

The moon landings were faked.  They went to Pluto and found an advanced civilization.  Re-classifying Pluto's planet status is all a big diversionary cover up for the fact that we have secretly appointed an ambassador to Pluto and he will be arriving on the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.

You have to be able to read between the lines to get the truth you know.