Something pretty amazing happened this week: we landed on Mars. Again. [Cue the inevitable jokes about all of the things we can’t do even though we can land an SUV-sized vehicle on Mars.]
NASA’s media-savvy engineers and PR team had video available everywhere: On NASA TV, on the Web, on NASA apps for mobile devices, and on Xbox. Yep, that’s right…Xbox. Microsoft made use of a little-known app on Xbox, the Xbox LIVE Event Player, to bring live coverage of the landing to your television. And if you missed it, you still have a chance to catch that and half a dozen other videos about Curiosity in a special section dedicated to the Mars rover.
Just look for the Mars landing tile in the rotating section of the Home hub on your Xbox 360’s dashboard. If you don’t already have it installed, you’ll be asked to download the LIVE Event Player [now that’s a logical use of the LIVE brand!]. Once that’s installed, clicking the Mars landing tile launches the Mars Rover section, complete with an HD intro video. If you haven’t already seen it, check out Seven Minutes of Terror to learn about how the descent and landing process worked.
You can also watch the entire 2+ hours of landing coverage, but if you want to skip to the good stuff, fast forward to 1:20 for the coverage of the control room as they were receiving information back from the actual landing.
