Watched Mars robot Phoenix landing in real time

The first web browser came out in 1993. In 1994 the comet – or the pieces of the comet – Shoemaker-Levy 9, crashed into Jupiter, creating impact areas bigger than the Earth. At the time I was working for IBM Australia and merged the two.

I gave a presentation to my fellow employees about this fairly new World Wide Web thing and used the example of hundreds of thousands of people monitoring the Jupiter impact via their browsers and the NASA web site. I was one of the many as I think I had Mosaic Version 1.0 on my work PC. Running OS/2 no doubt. The audience was rather impressed with this, as most had never heard of Browsers etc, I’d tip.

So 15 years later, specifically Monday May 26th 2008, it was a nostalgic moment. Except this time I was accessing NASA TV via my Firefox browser. And watching the descent of the Mars probe Phoenix live on (web) TV. The image wasn’t that big, but it was clear and in colour.

And boy was it tense. As you may know Mars is so far away that even at the speed of light, it takes about 15 minutes for a message to get there (and 15 more to get back). So the NASA people simply cannot steer the ship in real time. It has to be a robot; able to work out where it is during the descent, how it’s going and adjust itself.

It was fascinating to see the reaction of the NASA controllers as the reports came in ‘live’. Parachutes deployed. Radar had found the ground. 5 meters to go. Touchdown.

I was about to turn blue, but was soon breathing again.