Just a reminder for people interested in outer space projects:

The latest NASA Mars probe is scheduled for a friendly or (hopefully not) unfriendly encounter with Mars in the early hours of Monday, August 6, 2012 EST.

If I read things correctly, the golf cart sized vehicle will be slowed by a parachute as it enters Mars’ thin atmosphere. Then when it gets near the surface an umbrella shaped group of rockets are supposed to power up, hover over the surface, and gently lower the delivery load to the surface using cables. The system is too heavy to use the air bags that have been used in the past. And they want to avoid having the rockets get too close to the surface where dust could confuse the control systems.

This project reportedly cost something like 2.5 billion dollars. And it takes about 17 minutes for radio signals to travel from the present location of Mars in the sky to the Earth. So for at least that length of time there are likely to be more than a few NASA workers sitting on the edges of their seats.

To cover the possibility that if at the end of that 17 minutes (plus any radio signal blackout time due to heating effects as the probe enters the atmosphere) there is nothing but radio silence, I hope, with humor intended, that the NASA people will have a few ambulances and heart defibrillators ready for action.