Mars Polar Lander Landing Watching The Landing Events Over The Internet
Internet
http://marslander.jpl.nasa.gov/lander/landing_interne
t.html
The Mars Polar Lander launch will be transmitted live in various
ways over the Internet. In most cases, the broadcasts will be using
NASA TV as their source. NASA TV is a resource designed to provide
real-time coverage of NASA activities and missions as well as
providing resource video to the news media, and educational
programming to teachers, students and the general public.
NASA TV NTV is broadcast on GE-2, transponder 9C, C-Band, located
at 85 degrees West longitude. The frequency is 3880.0 MHz.
Polarization is vertical and audio is monaural at 6.8 MHz.
For the NASA TV schedule and the Mars Polar Lander timeline for
December 3, see this page:
http://marslander.jpl.nasa.gov/lander/landing_timelin
e.html
* NASA TV
Several organizations transmit NASA TV over the World Wide
Web. Plugin software is normally required to view the NASA TV
transmissions, and it is highly recommend that you install
and test the plugin well in advance.
A live video broadcast of NASA TV from broadcast.com is
available here:
http://www.broadcast.com/events/nasa/marslanding/
A list of other sites where NASA TV is broadcast is
available here:
http://www.nasa.gov/ntv/ntvweb.html
* JPL WebCast
The camera for this WebCast is installed in the Mars Mission
Support Area at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This camera
provides a 360-degree live streaming video of the room and
NASA TV audio will be included. RealPlayer G2 or RealPlayer 7 Beta
is the required plugin and it works on a Windows
95/98/NT (unfortunately, the Mac versions of RealPlayer
haven’t been upgraded yet to support this particular camera). A
56K modem or better connection and a Pentium II or better
are recommended for best results. For a sample view of look
here:
http://marslander.jpl.nasa.gov/lander/behere.html
Once you have the plugin installed, then use this URL:
http://play.rbn.com/?url=planetfest/mission
/live/behere.rm&proto=rtsp
When the link is selected, the RealPlayer will popup a
message stating that it’s missing a plug-in and needs to contact
RealNetworks. Once it does this, it prompts again that it
has found the “Be Here iVideo” plug-in and requests confirmation
to
install.
Select “Yes”.
The plug-in gets installed and playback begins.
At this point, you’ll begin to see the live broadcast from
JPL. The cursor will change to a 4-arrow cursor when in the video
window indicating that you can navigate the video. To
navigate the video, it’s “click and drag” inside the video window
to control the
direction of the video. Zoom is
accomplised with the Shift and Ctrl keys — Shift Zooms In,
Ctrl Zooms Out.
* JPL WebCam
We have another camera installed in the Mars Mission Support
Area at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This Webcam updates
once a minute and does not require any plugins, just view it
through your browser:
http://marslander.jpl.nasa.gov/lander/jpl.html
* Ames WebCast
Ames Research Center is also providing a live WebCast from
JPL. A RealPlayer plugin is required, and the Ames Webcast
events has been scheduled to not conflict with the events on
the NASA TV schedule:
