Curiosity experiences its Seven Minutes of Terror tonight, or becomes loose parts scattered across Mars.

• 1:31AM (after midnight tonight) Eastern Daylight
• 12:31AM (after midnight tonight) Central Daylight
• 11:31PM Mountain Daylight
• 10:31PM Pacific Daylight

The software orchestrating this landing sequence is running on the operating system I teach, VxWorks.

Addendum

Well before Curiosity’s launch, I had the privilege of teaching some of the responsible engineers at JPL in Pasadena. They were hyper-focused on timing accuracy in the OS. I showed them the details of the implementation, and answered their questions to satisfaction.

Curiosity was subsequently placed on the surface of Mars in the most complex landing ever attempted.

I made a small contribution to that success.