Mars Polar Lander Landing
Watching The Landing Events Over The Internet

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_timeline.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

• NASA Quest WebCast

  NASA Quest is also providing a live WebCast from JPL. A RealPlayer plugin is required, and the NASA Quest Webcast events has been scheduled to not conflict with the events on the NASA TV schedule:

  http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/mars/polar.html

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