A nice play by play of the landing culled from the YouTube comments (attributed to "flyhighj65"):<p><pre><code> 0:15 - Obviously heat shield separation
~0:25 to 0:30 - Back shell separation and powered flight
0:31 to 0:38 - The rover banks to move towards the
upper left corner of the screen (camera looks opposite
direction of motion)
0:38 to 0:41 - The rover banks the opposite direction
and stops its horizontal motion to drop straight down
~0:47 - Skycrane maneuver begins
0:48 - Wheels deploy (top left corner of screen)
Touchdown is shortly after the video ends
</code></pre>
Just as aside, it's amazing that people spend significant effort making intelligent remarks on YouTube (such as the above) only to see it get buried in a sea of inane comments. (It's already at 1,380 comments for this Mars video.)
There was a discussion on Reddit about the instrumentation on MER - specifically that every concievable scientific instrument is on the rover, but no HD video camera or microphone. Apparently, the reasoning behind this is that these things are scientifically uninteresting.<p>But imagine the PR benefit of getting full-motion video and audio from Mars. Even if we don't learn anything interesting from this, the media effect would have been tremendous. People could finally see video and sound on the evening news, in HD...almost like being on Mars. It's too bad the MER team wasn't willing to do this, seems like it would have been a relatively cheap addition to the project.<p>But don't get me wrong, this is still very, very cool.
The success of NASA in putting landers/rovers on Mars is spectacular. Maybe not in absolute terms but...<p><pre><code> NASA = 7 successes
everyone else = failure
</code></pre>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Timeline" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Timeline</a>
I can't wait to see the higher definition videos. Also - there was quite a bit of dust being blown around there.<p>It will be interesting to see if there is any followup as to whether the SkyCrane maneuver is really required, or, whether in the future, we can land directly on rocket engines. Particularly with the Plutonium power supply - no need to be concerned about solar cells getting covered in dust.<p>Also - I seem to recall that there can be fairly significant dust storms on mars anyways - so it's not as though landing without rocket engines means that the Rover will be immune from getting struck by pebbles/rockets/dust.
What's happening at the beginning there with that disc-like object that looks like it's free falling towards the surface?<p>Edit: ah, the Youtube description says the beginning part is the heatshield separating.
When does the parachute detach? When is the sky crane activated?<p>Is the cloudy stuff at the end of the video just dust kicked up by the rover, or an existing cloud (of dust)?<p>Also, I would love to see some image stabilization applied.<p>EDIT: Answered! <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4349125" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4349125</a>
Again, congratulations to the team responsible for that at NASA! Space exploration has advanced science like no other area.<p>What really rubs me the wrong way are some of those Youtube comments that go like "Why spend so much money on NASA?". Clearly, the spendings on NASA are minuscule compared to what the US spends on it's military or on the banks. That's a rather sad fact.
I think it saw this - <a href="http://www.alicesastroinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Curiosity+killed+the+cat.+source+smosh+facebook+page_06d5f5_3980829.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.alicesastroinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Cu...</a>