–John Keats
(Historical note: apparently the “new planet” is a reference to Uranus, discovered in 1781.)
View of the parachute descent, taken from the HiRISE orbiter:
http://twitpic.com/ag8j1w/full
Fuck yeah.
When full-res, color images start to become available, does anyone know if they’ll be made public, and in a format that maintains all the color information?
Awesome.
Listening to the NASAJPL news right now. They were answering a question on the speed on impact, and the vertical and horizontal speeds were given do get an idea of decent velocity; I think the vertical speed was something like half a meter/sec, and the horizontal speed was something like, .4cm/sec, and one of the guys on the panel remarked, “Pretty much straight down.” 
I know I am a total weenie, but I cried a little seeing that.
Don’t know why, but I did anyway.
Why can’t they put a microscope on a rover and do the same thing?
I can’t answer with any real confidence, but a human would be able to determine, in real time, which samples to look at, and perform a much more detailed and comprehensive look into analyzing samples and slides, while presumably being able to perform other tests on samples to determine organic compounds, or what have you.
With a probe, you have very limited scientific payload/instruments, a ~15 minute round-trip delay in communications, and you loose all the finesse a human brings in actually being there, which is a huge benefit in and of itself.
ETA: Microscopes are what’s on Curiosity and more. Which brings with it all the excitement we’re seeing. 
That’s funny - the science source I heard from NASA was saying that this “skycrane” was not a feasible way to land packages that were heavier than Curiosity and that they were still looking for some practical means to land really heavy packages, i.e. manned landers.
I suppose that if Queen Isabella had robotic explorers back in her day, today we’d all be speaking Native American languages and saying, “What the heck are those things anyway?”
This, plus the fact that it’s tough to imagine any microbial life on Mars being smaller than bacteria, and a skilled human operator of a high-quality optical scope can rapidly detect bacteria via staining, phase-contrast, etc. with extremely high confidence and repeatability.
Basically, he pops outside for some soil, does some basic sample prep, and within a few minutes, radios the results back to Earth.
Then he goes on to run extractions, PCRs, basic protein blots, and a bunch of other things that a well-trained lab scientist can do in a very short period of time, all while giving you extremely valuable subjective impressions on landscape, soil textures and colors, basic chemical tests, etc.
Furthermore, if Curiosity (or some future probe) does, eventually, find evidence of martian life, you can rest assured the answer of whether or not we’ll be sending men to Mars will be much, much sooner, rather than later.
I have a question. Some of the people in the facility looked really damn young. Does anyone know what specifically these people do and what sort of education was required? Obviously I’m not talking about the head honchos that gave the press conference after the landing, but all “the blue shirts” that made it the whole thing possible. I’d say some were in their mid20s, so what exactly did these people do to get a job there? Wouldn’t NASA require some of these youngsters to at least get their feet wet doing some other sort of rocket sciencey stuff somewhere else?
A man rated lander would be more conventional in approach, a para sail with a rocket on the bottom, far as i remember, getting down was never the problem. The return to orbit was the main sticking point.
Declan
They probably “got their feet wet” by working on smaller-scale aerospace projects in the course of undergrad or graduate education. Some of them are probably current graduate students, and whatever they are contributing is basically their thesis project. I have a friend who did just that: while getting a BS + MS in aerospace engineering, he worked on university affiliated projects, designing a (small) satellite and instruments to go on larger satellites. He’s now one of the “really damn young” mid-20s guys you see in the SpaceX control room.
Really, there isn’t any place to get rocket science experience outside of NASA and it’s contractors (or the equivalents in other countries).
Most likely grad students or even graduates from CalTech, MIT, etc. if they didn’t already have prior experience in engineering/rocketry/physics/etc.
Werner von Braun wanted to send six ships to Mars, to provide help and rescu should the need arise.
I presume a very large tanker will go, the problem is getting it down there.
Some suggestions have been to send the return vehicle, fuel and supplies first, so the guys who get there have food and gas for sure.
Sadly, not on my cable system but I found it on my Roku.
How long until we see claims of this using the same studio back lot as the Lunar landings
True enough. But also consider that those folks in the control room were for the most part just watching things unfold. Either things were gonna work right or they were not. It’s not like at the last second something major was going to unfold and some kind of seat of the pants “top gun engineer” manuever was going to save the day. And any possible last minute remedial action had probably been reviewed by dozen people a dozen different ways over the many years of the program.
Not to take anything away from those bright young folks, but the program surely has plenty of middle aged and old fart types working for NASA and their contractors that have not been seen that do their best to make sure nothing gets overlooked and everything gets triple checked blah blah blah. Yes, those young folks contributed greatly to the program but its doubtfull the program is filled to brim with young whippper snappers either.
Not to mention that they would know something was wrong fifteen minutes after it happened, and commands would take another fifteen minutes to get there. 
Oh yes that too for sure. I guess I should have said “last 30 minute plus some extra X minutes of time” remedial action 