Curiosity lands on Mars

Even though we already know the Curiosity rover lands successfully, this is worth watching just to see the way the room’s quietly contained tension erupts into genuine, emotional release: hugs, laughter, tears — the whole works.

As my friend Luke put it, “The nerds dropped a Mars rover mid-Olympics. Your move, jocks.”

NASA gives this recap:

NASA’s most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation.

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars, including the final severing of the bridle cords and flyaway maneuver of the rocket backpack.

Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5, PDT, (1:32 a.m. EDT Aug. 6) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life.

Continue reading here, below the photo.

8 thoughts on “Curiosity lands on Mars”

  3. It would be invidious not to congratulate the team at JPL and NASA on their great achievement in successfully landing Curiosity on Mars. We are, I think, very fortunate to be incarnate at this time of early space exploration when knowledge of our planetary environment is expanding so rapidly.
    All the energy planet Earth and its occupants will ever need is available from the Sun. We must now develop our technologies and politics in order to harness it safely, reliably and for the benefit of all. In the meantime, let us learn to love the arguments caused by our dichotomies because they are the engines of our progress – a message from Venus at the end of her Gemini transit, perhaps.
    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/06-4

  5. And, the sign relates.  You know what they say,…”Curiosity killed the cat”, is a proverb used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation.  

    Reference: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_killed_the_cat#section_1

    Also, Shakespeare used a similar quote in his circa 1599 play, Much Ado About Nothing:

    “ What, courage man! what though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care. ”

  6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator

    RTGs are a serious problem. We are spreading plutonium around the solar system. There are currently 72 pounds orbiting Saturn aboard Cassini that will eventually plunge into the atmosphere and burn up. At least the RTGs in Mars are contained by the robots around them, already inside the atmosphere, but one of the first laws of nature is diffusion. Eventually that plutonium will spread all over Mars.

    There is also a potential problem at launch. If the launch vehicle explodes near Earth’s atmosphere, the plutonium burns up and is distributed throughout the planet, and it takes very little to cause lung cancer. There is a long history to this.

    I’ve been writing about it since the 1990s, when I learned about it; but it goes back a lot further.

    http://www.planetwaves.net/grossman.html

  7. Curiouser and curiouser. Here we are on August 6 denouncing Hiroshima and nuclear power while celebrating its export to Mars in the plutonium-fuelled MSL. Does mankind’s dichotomy know no bounds?

  8. Thanks so much for posting this, Amanda. JPL is close to home and for various reasons, close to heart. The joy, the tears, the emotion comes through in this video as one dream is realized brought tears to my own eyes. Oh that we ‘one-day’/now could all experience this kind of “teamwork” of dream-creating such that we open our eyes to the realization that we are All One.
    xo

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