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Bill Nye, Star Trek Barbershop Quartets and a Space Rave: What It Was Like to Celebrate Curiosity with NASA's MSL Team

_Motherboard's space correspondent Amy Teitel was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, over the weekend to hang out and party extraterrestrial-style with NASA's Mars Science Laboratory team. The MSL group, of course, was waiting...

Motherboard’s space correspondent Amy Teitel was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, over the weekend to hang out and party extraterrestrial-style with NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory team. The MSL group, of course, was waiting nervously for the landing of Curiosity, which was a roaring success. Here are a series of photos and captions Amy sent me late last night before collapsing in a Mars-bliss-fueled exhaustion. — Derek Mead

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NASA let me in the front door. Already I’m in nerd heaven.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule at Planet Fest.

Bill Nye giving an interview at Planet Fest. This is as close to him as anyone not from a “real” media outlet could get. People actually stood next to him to “get their picture taken with” Bill Nye the Science Guy.

There was a display of space-y things, like a Curiosity rover. Of course the obvious joke of “NASA’s blowing up curiosity” doesn’t go over well without seeing the picture first. A lot of people got mad at me other Twitter for that one.

A Star Trek barbershop quartet. Yes, this is real. And they’re weren’t bad either.

That night there was a Mars party put on by the Planetary Society and apparently SpaceX paid for a bunch of promotional stuff like blackberry cases and glow sticks. They were handed out by women dressed like this. Apparently Lady Gaga look alikes are very into Mars? I thought this was going to be a proper nerd party with engineers and beer…

…Instead there was this guy. He was safe so long as he didn’t play Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call.” (For those of you who haven’t seen Mars Attacks! multiple times, that’s the song that makes the martians’ heads explode. Gross.)

The party was more of a rave with people in costumes dancing and proper nerds standing around awkwardly. It was really sort of strange to see Rob Manning, a badass entry descent and landing engineer get up and talk in front of that crowd. But, as I’ve learned before, engineers might be nerds but they do know how to party.

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So JPL the day of landing the media room was buzzing. It’s hard to see but there were makeshift tables set up and people just crammed in. It was hot and stuffy and the image of a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters came to mind. Not that I think journalists are monkeys. There was just a lot of clacking on keyboards.

I was in the spillover media trailer. It was less glamorous. But way cooler. Literally. There were less people so we had room to move, breathe, and didn’t have to sweat onto each other.

Peanuts are a tradition with Mars missions. Apparently since Ranger 7, when someone ate peanuts close to the spacecraft’s entry on Mars and ended the run of failures, engineers eat peanuts a certain point before entry into the planet’s atmosphere. (I’ll look into that and get the whole story soon!)

So about 40 minutes before landing (Earth-receiving time) I moved into the press conference room to watch the big loud live feed from mission control. Earth-receiving time means the information is coming at a 14 minute delay – that’s how long telemetry takes to get to Earth from Mars at the speed of light. This means that by the time we started getting feeds from mission control about the spacecraft’s reentry, it was already on the surface. It’s maddening knowing that what’s happened has happened and you’re just behind the times.

So there was a lot of me looking like this in the live hangout I did on Google+. Staring at the big screen, waiting for something to happen so I could tell our viewers.

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And then we got the word that Curiosity was safely on the surface. It was absolutely chaotic – the entire site just started screaming. Within minutes the first picture came back. This is my shot of a screen shot so it sucks, but this is the first image from Curiosity. It’s the read hazcam (hazard camera) that looks for hazards that could stop the rover in its tracks. There’s a clear cover on it that got dusty during landing, which is why it’s not great quality. But it’s the first so it’s awesome.

Then all the EDL engineers in their matching blue polos crammed into the press centre. There was a lot of chanting and a fair bit of teary speeches.

Of course, this is just the beginning of Curiosity’s mission. In a few sols (what days are called on Mars, a short form of solar days), Curiosity will lift its “head” and look around, sizing up it’s environment allowing engineers to figure out exactly where it landed and they can start it’s mission from there. As epic a landing as the Sky Crane was, all the science is still to come.

Lead image via the AP

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