In the livestream of the press conference. After they show the video, there's a more detailed analysis where they point out the things I would otherwise have missed, starting at about the 16 minute mark.
When I saw the pattern on the parachute I thought there must be some meaning behind the pattern they chose.
I watched live, and I watch every one of these videos when they come up in my feeds. (This is the best one so far, KB, thanks for surfacing it!) And every single time I get choked up watching it happen. Is it just me? Is it just because I worked at NASA? Or do other people have this reaction as well?
Haha sure - I'm a JPLer - systems engineer on the gas dust removal tool (gDRT) on Percy/M20 half the time and drive Curiosity/MSL with the other half of my time :). Percy is the first robot I've worked on pre-landing (I joined the Curiosity team in 2016), so my reaction to all these landing videos feels so much stronger than what I remember from MSL's landing. Granted, MSL had a much lower-res EDL video pointing at the surface from the bottom of the rover, but still, knowing something I helped develop and did V&V for is on Mars now is another level. It's also pretty crazy knowing the people in all the videos and interviews! What did you do at NASA? Which center were you working for?
Fantastic! I'm so jealous of your work... I was at Ames Research Center back when they had planes, in the mid-1990's. I was originally a SysAdmin for their Macs and UNIX boxes (having come directly from Apple tech support), and then worked on a team that was tasked with creating multimedia for NASA. So using Macromedia Director to make CDs and LaserDiscs, setting up some of the very first web sites on the WWW, and developing K-12 science training materials around various projects at NASA. One of the main projects we had was a self-based training, on CD, that taught our scientists "Publishing On The Web". It was a tool to help them understand how to set up set of static web pages and share their data/research with their colleagues around the world. Because, everyone was printing out thousands of pages of papers, shipping them via DHL for Flying Tigers to 9 other researchers elsewhere in the world, and spending thousands of dollars on shipping fees. I won the "NASA Software Product of the Year" award for that one, actually. Good times. I loved it there. (Found the article on the award here, on page 5 of this PDF: https://history.arc.nasa.gov/Astrogram/Astrogram_1998_03_06.pdf )