6 ms·

Yes, those are all Earth Receive Time, that is, when they were saying that eg. entry interface is two minutes away, in reality the rover was already sitting on

• unanswered 6y ago
  > Earth Receive Time Ah great, that's a great phrase to make everything clear and provide a kind of "frame of reference" to think & communicate in. Always need these abstractions.
• m4rtink 6y ago
  The local Czech stream (20k viewers!) I watched went over the events in real time and then commented how events were happening as signals were received on Earth - with the final confirmation of successful landing coming first via Twitter, no less! :) Still a very nice yet nerve wrecking idea to do it like this - you know the lander is on Mars now. But is it safely on the ground or is there a third Shapirelli crater now ? You don't know! A huge relief in the end. :)
• matt-attack 6y ago
  But aren’t those two events essentially simultaneous in the relativistic sense? That is by some definitions of “simultaneous”?
  • zwkrt 6y ago
    In one sense, light experiences no time during travel, so anytime you are hit by radiation (like from a star) there is frame of reference in which the event was instantaneous. On the other hand, if you were on Earth and I was in between Earth and Mars, I would receive the data more quickly than you, and I could even watch it whiz by me on its way to you. The thing about relativity is that it’s... relative!