[seunghomattyang]

Is there anything left to be done by NASA HQ? For example, are they still controlling the trajectory of the probe to Mars or is that mostly done by probe's onboard computers?

I'm genuinely curious about what kind of things the HQ is doing right now. I've been watching the live stream and there's not much activity besides milling around screens and resizing windows on the huge screen.

[greatreorx]

From a Reuters piece...

"Mission control contemplated sending Curiosity one last "parameter update" on Sunday, hours before atmospheric entry, giving the vessel an exact fix on its position in space. But NASA engineers said they would likely forego that transmission because the vessel has varied so little from its ideal course.

Otherwise, controllers will have little to do but anxiously track Curiosity's progress as it flies into Mars' upper atmosphere..."

"We're all along for the ride," Seltzner said."

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/06/us-usa-mars-idINBRE...

[yk]

At

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardwar...

it is said, that 08:23:00 PM was the last time at which they could change the trajectory 'manually.' (So I assume, that they have just very good seats to watch the show in the HQ )

[natep]

Plenty to do, since monitoring and understanding all of the incoming data is most of what operations is, but in this case, no commands were sent while the stream was live.