Curiosity Mars Rover Landing Timeline: What to Expect Tonight

Actually, it might take a lot longer than that! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t7p08hcQzs

I'm very excited/nervous. I haven't felt this way about a space mission in a long time. My daughter (she's 10) made me promise to wake her up for it.

I have proper butterflies in my stomach right now. I hope nothing goes wrong...

Not sure about PBS tonight but I'm going to be watching direct from NASA: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/nasatv/

There's a live blog plus the ustream here: http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/msl/status.html

It's starting to get a little bogged down though.

There's that, and also that this is a pretty interesting landing compared to previous landing methods. There's been a lot of hype over just the landing gear. I've got non-techie friends who are tuning in just to see the engineering feat.

I find myself more excited because of the complexity of this task. 7 minutes of terror? Rockets fighting Gs while crane is lowering the vehicle down? All done by computer with none help from humans (as you know in flying computers are awesome at straight flying (autopilot) but horrible on landing, something here seems to be all about).

Looking forward seeing this mission succeed. And wouldn't be surprise to see some of those grownup man at the cockpit letting some loose. I know if I was in charge of this mission, I would pee all over myself, if succeed!