Which are the top albums? Any idea?

ver no google.

Hope the chutes on Phoenix Mars lander remain intact upon deployment. Best wishes for the girl to land safely in a prime spot and best of luck for everything with the mission to go well. Those will be ten hour-long minutes while waiting for communication from the lander to say it’s down and everything is A-OK.

On one level, it may be fine and dandy to jack up the metabolism to a ludicrous pace suited to marketing preconceptions on the attention-deficit of a generation jaded by whip-fast stimuli, and justifiable on another level to try to cram in as much as possible within a limited duration such breakneck back-and-forth between the talking heads and the fairly well-done cgi sequences in an editing tour de force…but for crying out loud already, this is getting ridiculous!

Worse, the PR departments at NASA and JPL are obviously buying into precisely the same sensationalist (clap)trap that Hollywood is famous for which you, Phil – and so many others – have worked so hard to try to rectify.

Phil, please, we can usually rely on your laser-like sharp eye to point out misrepresentations – especially gross ones – to keep us all straight, no matter what the source. Your mention of the inaccurate use of the word “friction” by one of the commentators is proper and a good point…just that ONE POINT.

But you leave an awful lot hanging there! For example, in the cgi sequence when the lander is released from the backshell the action is so ridiculously speeded up that it looks like it’s falling in a gravitational field of maybe 50 g’s! It looks as if it was shot out of a cannon toward the surface!

Come ON already!!! Doesn’t anyone ever notice this sort of shameless hyper-exaggeration anymore? What are kids to bring away from this video? That they have been given an accurate and informative sense of the actual events that will transpire during that “SE7EN MINUTES OF TERROR”???

Gimme a friggin’ break already. This trend of padding the material up for public consumption is grotesque beyond belief. The actuality is spectacular enough as it is. WHY are these lousy wrongheaded gimmicks being utilized? For improvement???

And what about all the many cool things that will actually have to happen that we are NOT seeing in this “very cool video”?

We don’t see how the lander is programmed to begin firing it’s thrusters a second after release.*

We don’t see how it’s programmed to maneuver “upwind” AWAY from the backshell/parachute in order to minimize the chance of recontact.

We don’t see MANY cool things that ACTUALLY will happen (hopefully, of course, along the lines of the desired plan).

What do we see instead in the moments before landing? Some peculiar guesswork gyrations that look like a major departure from the nominal – so much so that it looks like the lander is in major stability trouble or fighting an invisible dust devil.

As for the quality of the cgi parts in this video in general? The real-time paced sequences are fairly well accomplished. Maas Digital does superb work. But IMHO their work on the MER landing was BY FAR better done.

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*Oh yeah, dropping the lander out of the backshell at a mere 3.72 m/s^2 or 0.38 g’s would have RUINED the “drama” of the preferred cannon-shot – “sciencefix”, pay attention now: one trusts that you don’t “teach motion” by referring to another similarly wildly imbecilic sequence that rarely icites a rolling of the eyes – in the film Apollo 13, when the LEM’s main engine is employed for a course-correction maneuver, we see the whole stack take off as if it was under the impulse of ALL FIVE of the F5 engines of the first stage. The word “ridiculous” doesn’t seem to have any meaningful impact when such a stupendous stupidity appears in a POPULAR film that did extremely well at the BOX OFFICE. (”OBVIOUSLY” it made MONEY which MEANS that it had the RIGHT RECIPE for SUCCESS, and INCIDENTALLTY it’s ONLY a MOVIE, ad nauseam). Meanwhile, we are all teaching the general public pure crap because we treat them like consumers rather than thinking, curious beings invested with something that resembles intelligence.

Ok. I’ve said it. SOMEBODY has to.