Landing on Mars - Curiosity

BURBANK, CA -- Good morning everybody! Since I just wrote that long post about running and running gear yesterday, I thought this would be an appropriate start:

Haha... yesterday I did 8 miles, which went well - they were all under pace by a decent margin. Today is "only" 5 miles, and then 13 on Saturday. Another pretty good one:

Hahaha. These things get passed around on facebook all the time, and most of the time I don't share them, but those two were too good to pass up. On a more travel-related theme, which is more of what the overall spirit of this blog is about:

Lastly, I give you a great shot of me tossing a Frisbee in Australia, taken by super-awesome travel buddy Paula Asinas:

Check out that form!

On a blog layout tangent, there are a few new features I have added to catch up with the times. On the right-hand side there are now four buttons for facebook, twitter, we heart it, and google plus. Feel free to like, tweet, heart, and plus away! I also added a "popular post" section with the top five posts based on individual post views. Some of them seem obviously right (All 50 States, 100 Posts/Last Days in Egypt) while a few others I would have predicted to make the cut did not (how about anything from Antarctica?). In any case, they are pretty good and will change as people find and read other posts along the way.

Beyond traveling and running, two of the more exciting things to happen in the past month or so were that I finally felt my first earthquake back on August 7. It was a tiny little 4.4, but at least now I can check that one off the list!

A couple of days before that, I live-tweeted the final hours and landing of the NASA Mars Curiosity rover, which was a phenomenal success. Check out this amazing video of the final couple of minutes from NASA's JPL mission control, just 10 mins down the road from me over in Pasadena, CA:

Since landing, the rover snapped a bunch of photos and has gotten a chance to try out all of the various instruments it has, dusting everything off after 9 months of traveling some 350+ million miles from Earth. Yesterday, for the first time, Curiosity got to drive away from the landing site.

You can clearly see Curiosity's tracks in this photo, taken yesterday.

This is the first image Curiosity snapped from Mars, two weeks ago.

At the end of my live-tweeting the event, which was characterized by "seven minutes of terror," I wrote the following:

NASA just lined up multiple satellites in Mars orbit and live-relayed telemetry of Curiosity, a spacecraft the size of a car that slowed from 13,200mph to zero in 7 minutes, and hit a target within 1,000 meters after a 352 MILLION mile trip. And all of this happened blindly, a 13 light-minutes communications signal delay away. Congratulations to all - absolutely surreal.

Illustrating the above, not only did satellites orbiting Mars relay Curiosity's telemetry to Earth, but they even got a picture of Curiosity during the landing, with the parachute deployed.

This color relief photo shows Curiosity on the surface of Mars - this was taken by a satellite in Mars orbit.

Taken from Curiosity, this is the first color panorama, looking to the edge of Gale Crater.

Finally, I will leave you with the following video. These are thousands of images stitched into an HD movie. Due to the data bandwidth required, this was not relayed in real-time, but in the past couple of days everything finally made it back to earth and was stitched together. This is the last 45 seconds of flight, from the heat shield dropping away until the actual landing. It is a stunning reminder of what we can accomplish when we set our minds to it. Enjoy!