Comment by alister | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alister | Hacker News Reader

A nice play by play of the landing culled from the YouTube comments (attributed to "flyhighj65"):

  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

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.)

FYI, it's sped up because they only take 4-5 frame per seconds. The heat shield separation is at +278s (278 seconds after atmospheric entry) and the touchdown is at +416s. That's a difference of 138 seconds, which in the video takes about 38 sec (0:15 - 0:53), so the play-back speed up is about a factor of 3.6.

I read somewhere that they have 720p full color video of the descent at 10fps, which will be transmitted eventually. I can't wait.

I know that a HD version will eventually make its way from Mars to Earth, but I have read in a couple of places that the Descent Imager only operates at 5 fps. That could have been a mis-statement though.

I (or perhaps what I was reading) may have had the descent cam's stats confused with the high-quality mast cam, which won't be deployed until next week. Still exciting, though.

It's a shame YouTube don't make YouTube comments hierarchical. It would probably help.

It's a shame they don't just give up on comments completely. With rare exceptions like this one, they add nothing.

As they stand currently, yes. I feel like making a blog post about it.

But the YouTube community loves to participate ;)

YouTube comments are the funniest on the Internet, this is fact.

You've never checked out your local newspaper website have you?

They add viewers! They would lose a lot of traffic if people couldn't interact with the page in some way.

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