Last night, while most of us were sleeping like a bunch of lazy-asses, humanity landed on Mars. OK, no actual humans went to Mars, but a bunch of very talented rocket scientists sent the Curiosity rover to land on the Red Planet-- and against incredible odds, they actually succeeded. In this modern era of sci-fi it might be easy to forget just how difficult it is to land a human-made object on a different planet, so check out this video below, of the Curiosity team back on Earth, as they celebrate the successful mission.
The first photos from the rover are starting to come in, many of them on NASA's Twitter feed, but to the untrained eye they look like grainy photographs of dirt, and with my utter lack of astronomy knowledge i have no idea what to tell you about them. But at the NASA website, you can learn that the photo is of the Gale Crater, and even the very existence of the gravel in the photo comes into question. Where did it come from? What is it made of? I guess you really can't ask too simple a question when you're looking for life on another planet.
But back to that celebration video for a minute. I spent a lot of the weekend watching the Olympics, like many of us, and it's always fascinating to watch the reactions of both the winners and the losers, people who have trained for years to reach this very moment, who are greeted with either victory or agonizing defeat. The team behind the Curiosity rover have been doing the same thing, working for years on one specific task that may or may not have come with any reward. It's a thrill to watch them celebrate such a massive accomplishment-- and maybe a little motivation for the rest of us on a Monday morning.
