Mars Rover to Land Tonight

The Opportunity mars rover lands tonight Saturday, 24th at 9pm PST. (Sunday 25th at 5am UTC)

Apparently the command center at JPL in Pasadena will be televised on C-SPAN for those of you who have cable television.

Nasa TV is also available on the web, but it will probably be very crowded around that time.

In the meantime, check out this awesome satellite picture animation of Spirit's landing zone.

Since Spirit has been having problems, there's been a slight shift in the plans. The team was originally going to split up with the experts shifting their attention to Opportunity's deployment and Spirit continuing it's exploration. However, since they still don't know what happened with Spirit, most of the experts are still working on it.

They don't want the same thing that happened to Spirit to happen to Opportunity, so it will be deployed much more slowly and wait for Spirit's diagnosis before taking much action.