That's a couple of hours than they originally scheduled. I wonder what caused the change?
The surveillance baseline only has a length of eight hours or so, so they don't have much leeway in actual landing window if they need the touch-down to be visible.
Here's a compilation of latest news ( from yesterday )
Nationalism is all we've got to push forward space exploration; While there were initially subtexts involving spy satellites and nuclear weapons, the tech has been there for forty years, and forty years ago we stopped making progress and settled into a holding pattern involving the Shuttle and a modest space station in some sort of 'spirit of cooperation' that is earmark- rather than goal-oriented.
I can only hope China's national inferiority complex is intense enough to propel human beings beyond low earth orbit once more, and shame us out of our hyperpower exceptionalism. Yes, shame - Russia can send someone to the ISS and the US cannot - and without the US feeling ashamed of that, there is no Dragon, no Dream Chaser, no Orion.
Without a political space race, there's no resources for this sort of thing except for the passing billionaire.
"Nationalism is all we've got to push forward space exploration"
What about the Google X-Prize for the moon lander? Several teams are competing. There are certainly other ways to push technologies forward. X-Prizes help. Finding other ways to tap into the $15 trillion US economy would help too.
But... putting a man on Mars takes a good chunk of his life for no gain to anyone. Why not "first country to build a 700-foot traditional stone pyramid"? "First country to paint 30% of its land area blue"?
I'd be more excited about getting people to Mars, and so would presumably many other - and it'd provide much more advances and gains than building a pyramid.
We are getting there, seen as how MRO managed to snap a picture of Curiosity's descent.
Or how NASA tried to work with India (Chandrayaan-1 and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) to perform a bistatic radar experiment. I find the idea of two entirely diferent crafts operated by two countries and working together to be fascinating.
Video: http://english.cntv.cn/live/
Text: http://live.china.org.cn/2013/12/13/coming-soon-change-3-lan...