TONIGHT: Watch the MAVEN mars satellite LIVE!

First of all, I swear I am not a spam bot.

Secondly, the MAVEN observation satellite is going to enter Mars orbit later tonight, and NASA are streaming the whole thing live.

MAVEN is going to be observing the atmosphere with some high-tech shenanigans so that scientists can try and figure out why Mars went from a relatively warm and wet planet billions of years ago, to the dusty, majestic shit-hole that it is now.

The webcast begins at 9:30 pm. Currently they are answering questions about the mission (see stream below).

I absolutely love that we live in a time where I can watch an orbiter enter the atmosphere of Mars live on the internet. I am not entirely sure what level of footage we will get from MAVEN, I am hoping they will stream footage from the orbiter.

Freaking awesome.

Here's the LINK

Embed:

Thanks for the heads up, will def be checking this out tonight.

Damn, this made my spam bot trigger finger all itchy-like.

I can't wait. I love this stuff. Regardless of how you feel about space travel, it is incredible to see the amount of technical and scientific wizardry that makes this happen. They said on the Q and A that their job at this time is basically just to watch. The orbiter is pre-programmed and performs all its routines automatically. It's amazing.

I might post a load of links later to watch some football games LIVE in your browser.

My aunt watches satellites orbiting Mars at home and is making $2000 a week! Find out how!

But seriously, this seems cool. I'll probably forget to watch it though :|

@splodge: To really seal the deal you could write a wall of text with a jumbling of words in a nonsensical order that makes not one iota of sense.

I want to live on Mars. I want to play video games on Mars! Send me to MARS!

@splodge: Makes sense that it's pre-programmed, the time it would take for the signal to reach Mars if they were directly controlling it would be maddening. I love astronomy and space stuff, not terribly optimistic about space travel in our lifetimes but within the solar system is pretty reasonable I think.

9:30pm what time zone?

That's Eastern Standard. 2:30 am in europe.

MAVEN's a bot, just ban that instead.

Pfft, I can just go there in Destiny.

(this is rad and i'll totally watch it, thanks for the heads up)

Part of MAVEN's mission is to land on mars and scan an ancient computer console while Buzz Aldrin defends it against hordes of dudes named Doug.

Sorry for the bump, but this is starting NOW :)

EDIT - yall should really watch this. The hosts are amazing. Minimal media training, and NASA might be great at launching rockets but their video production department is lacking a few geniuses ;) Makes me impressed by how easy GB make putting on a live internet show look.

All these hours of Kerbal are paying off, I understand some of what they're saying!

THESE HOSTS ARE INSANE!

Hehehe I am giggling away at the terrible production. The lady is standing with her back turned to the camera, half blocking the specialist dude. Amazing.

I wish this was just a stream from mission control though. I want to hear those people.

@splodge: you should check out the MAVEN secret stream.

@theht said:

@splodge: you should check out the MAVEN secret stream.

BWAHAHAHA.

Amazing. 300 internet points to you.

::)

Thanks for this, it's late here in the UK but I'm going to try and stay awake for this

MAVEN is successfully in Mars orbit!

Show me Mars. I don't want to watch a stream of people talking about it. >_>

:D We made it!

I'm pretty sure it has to do its second correction to its orbit before turning on the camera. It's in orbit, but it still needs to change its orbit a bit to reach its final spot.

Maybe we'll get to see pictures or data tomorrow. :D

@truthtellah: Well then that's incredibly disappointing. :(

Well... *shrug* The data shows it's in orbit. ha. That's the big thing. Gotta go in steps. Maybe you can look up some pictures tomorrow!

Pretty depressing that not even 4,000 people are watching this. I mean, if you really think about it, it's beyond fucking depressing. Mars. We're landing another car-bot on it. And no one cares. This shit is in standard fucking definition. What. The. Fuck. We need to get some charisma behind this. Get Seacrest hosting a shitshow of popstars while this is streamed from a stage. It's all about the spin. Come on, people. "Top five sexiest satellites you'd like to see orbiting Mars." Look at this dude's hair. And his tie. Looks like he's trying to sell me bibles. God dammit.

Far out.

Is it almost time to see the satellite feed?

Okay, so I watched a little bit of this last night. Thanks @splodge for the heads up. You're right, the hosting is downright terrible. I laughed quite a bit when they'd be looking at the wrong camera while live. It is amazing how well GB does their live stuff in comparison.

I think the whole concept of what this satellite will hopefully accomplish is fascinating, but as with anything like this, any significant data should take a long time to acquire.

Does anyone know if there are cameras on the satellite? I was hoping for video or images once it hit orbit.

I'm totally going to tune in and watch this. Hopefully they have something like this for the manned mission to Mars in 2025 (?). One way trip baby!

this makes me sad how we're pussyfooting about sending people to mars. what happened to doing things not because they are easy, but because they are hard? humanity is a bunch of filthy casuls.

So was I , I think they just dont have the bitrate. They were transferring telemetry info at a whopping 40 bits per second. I imagine they will be doing burst packets of large files periodically when MAVEN is lined up properly with earth.

The hosting was amazing. Poor Gary. They were not media people though, Gary was some kind of Lockheed middle management and the lady was an administrator at Nasa it seemed. They were pretty stoked at the end of the broadcast and high-fived the shit out of eachother.