Nail-biting Mars Curiosity robotic rover mission touch-down

A momentous occasion is almost upon us for the intrepid space explorer mission to Mars in the name of NASA's Curiosity. A motor car sized robotic mobility science lab is about to set down on the infamous red planet to, among many things, shed light on whether life has ever existed there.

Curiosity is the most complex and most expensive probe ever sent to a planet mission as can be seen quite literally in the detailed image here.

Added to this complexity is the acutely risque landing procedure that NASA engineers developed. To get to its intended touch down zone, at the foot of a 3 mile high mountain, the descending probe on Monday (GMT) must enter the Martian atmosphere at a precise point. 

The the most dramatic and nail-biting part of the whole shebang begins two hours before it reaches Mars. At that point mission control will stop talking to the probe and the probe's onboard computers are programmed to execute its precise landing manoeuvres. 

Here bellow is a short sixty second animation from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory illustrating the thirteen minutes it takes, to successfully touch down.

Historical Tweets: Marie Antoinette: Let Them Tweet Cake!

If you tweet on twitter as I do than you may enjoy this entertaining web toy site through which you can search for a moment or place or event or person in history and reinvent the twitter timeline.

"Books have been ruining history. So many unnecessary words.  Now, with Historical Tweets, history’s most amazing men and women can be fully understood, a mere 140 characters at a time."

Be sure to hit the random button at the top of the page for more historical tweets.

Kutiman's Craftsman Music Experiment

Here is a cool video mix from Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman, an Israeli musician and producer who massage edited  together sounds from Craftsman's tools.

I think its worth pointing out that: No musical instruments were used in producing this clever media art piece.

Kutiman looks to have killed the video star with his revolutionary music creation technique,  and largely due to his first video getting over a million views he's likely to have become the first music star to have been gifted on Twitter !

Budgie Cyber Chat tweet tweet

Come to think of it we are all going to the birds as an ever increasing population of online voyeurs, doers and shakers, are all pecking to the rhythm of 140 characters or less, twattering, twittering and tweeting !

Feathered friend aficionado Andrew Grantham is showing us here "his budgie bird Nibbler watching "warboop's): Budgie Mickey on youtube:) You can hear my other budgie McChirps squawking in the background at the vocal Mickey but Nibbler wants to be more up Close and personal. When he hears/sees Mickey talking he gets very excited and goes into a pecking frenzy lol. "

So fellow twitter's, did we glean anything from watching our tweetering cousins providing the best of cyber twittering and retweetering ?