During landing, I was watching the plot of doppler shifts for Curiosity's tones, sent direct to earth. The doppler shift says how fast the spacecraft was moving relative to earth. I saw a sudden drop in doppler shift, just before they announced the parachute deploy - it was dramatic! I knew immediately that the parachute was doing something because nothing else would slow down the decent that quickly. Once earth set behind the crater rim, we no longer had a signal and relied on Odyssey for all "real-time" data. That's one of the reasons there was so much cheering when we heard that Odyssey and Curiosity were talking.
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