James Arthur Cattell - 2021 week 07

Weeknotes for 2021 week 07.

Monday 15 to Friday 19 February 2021.

This is a shorter week note than usual as I'm on annual leave for 9 days starting Saturday.

On Thursday evening I watched a live stream of the Perseverance Mars rover landing. At 1 hour 32 minutes 24 minutes (01:32:24) into the live stream the lander enters the martian atmosphere doing 5.3 kilometres (km) per second. That's fast enough to get me from home to Westminster in under 2 seconds.

Friction with the atmosphere then caused it to deccelerate at a force of 10 gravitaional units (or 10g) and at 01:37:22 the parachute deployed whilst the lander was supersonic. This quickly slowed it to subsonic speeds.

At 01:39:00 the lander's vision system produced a valid solution to land the rover and 25 seconds later the engines fired to steer and rover over the landing site.

50 seconds later the sky crane maneuver started and the rover was lowered to the surface and at 01:40:42 touchdown was confirmed and mission control errupted.

The really amazing thing for me was that it took just over 8 minutes to go from hitting the top of the atmosphere to landing.

On Wednesday afternoon Janet & I received our first covid vaccination. It was a very slick operation with members of the armed forces doing the actual injections. Once done, we had to sit in a room with everyone else for 15 minutes to make sure we didn't have any immediate side effects.

By the time I got home I was feeling rough, which has continued for a couple of days. But nothing bad enough to put me out of action. By Friday afternoon I started feeling like I had the flu and was sneezing quick frequently but my temperature remained normal.

Deliver Con 2021 is coming along. This week I built out the technology stack for the running event itself and got my fellow organisers to test it. All seems to be okay. We've decided to go with Microsoft Teams as it's less likely to be blocked than the alternatives. Have also created a calendar with all the sessions and lightning talk slots, plus created a board for people to suggest and vote on both.

...and with that, I'm off on annual leave returning 1 March 2021. Therefore no week notes next week.

Cheerio.