Mars Curiosity moment of joy: NASA JPL team high-fiving after landing (video)

[Video Link] As the post-landing press conference begins, NASA and JPL MSL leaders high-five and cheer with the Mars rover engineering and flight control team. I shot this last night (on my iPhone, pardon the shakiness) inside the Jet Propulsion Lab, at 11:15pm PDT, about 45 minutes after the rover landed, against all odds, on the surface of Mars.

* Despite the image on the screen behind them, this was not a Microsoft press conference.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: curiosity • jpl • Mars • MSL • NASA • rover • Science • Space

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http://www.facebook.com/justin.sabe Justin Sabe

All those macBooks at the EDL consoles and the presentation machines are Windows XP?
- http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo
  
  Good and solid, works well, and there are a zillion tweaks for it.
  
  Hmm, might install it on my other partition… there are a couple of deal-breakers for me with 7 and Vista gives me the shits.
Gwyneth Hannaford

XP oh wow. Hope that is not a english/metric kind of thing.
http://arib.livejournal.com Ari B.

It’s like they won the Super Bowl and World Series all at once. Best night I’ve had in years.
grimc

Rocket scientist high five is best high five.
theophrastvs

so NASA… you’re just building my hopes up again, aren’t you? (science teases…)
Gary61

This is the scene from JPL, with the program managers and directors, team leaders. Where are the reaction shots from the guys in the trenches, the assembly guys from the clean room?
Ted Lemon

Were the odds really against it? I was under the impression that they were pretty confident it would work!
- TaymonBeal
  
  They wouldn’t have done it if they weren’t pretty confident it would work. By that standard, though, it wasn’t what you’d call a sure thing; historically, the majority of missions to Mars haven’t worked.
Dan Richards

New video title: “50 awkward high-five/hand shake thingies”
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Yeah, there was a bit of a DeanScream/TipperKiss vibe.
Bob Knetzger

Are those BanLon shirts?