...maybe a Martian.
2012 is turning out to be a great year for science. Earlier this year we found the Higgs boson, further sealing our understanding of the standard model of particle physics (plus more in the future perhaps) and now an incredible Mars rover landing on a planet that takes twice as long for a signal to come back to Earth than it is to enter Mars atmosphere and land. Many people back in the 60s remember the space program and anyone who has a decent working memory back then and is still alive today can tell you exactly where they were when we landed on the moon. Some will even tell you that it was those events that led them into science. Today is one such day for the younger generation. Never before since the late 60s has there been a truly remarkable feat of space exploration until today. I hope that people will look back to this moment to finally realize that this was the sole event that stirred up the young people to go back to science and why the hell it took us so long to get there.
If you didn't know what was the big deal about this Mars landing, we basically sent a mini laboratory complete with a mass spectrometer, a drill, a frigging laser that vapourises rocks, a nuclearized version of a car battery, enough sensors to make your futuristic car look like a cheap oven thermometer and all this within the size of a Mini Cooper. Into space and on Mars. And we landed that lab using a parachute, retrorockets and a skycrane. With everything fully automated because by the time we get a signal that it has entered the atmosphere, the rover would have been on the ground (either in one piece or several thousand) for 7 minutes already. And it only cost less than a movie ticket per American resident. If your 5 year old kids don't think this is super cool, God knows what is. I don't need to emphasize this any more but we badly need something like this. I hate to see science and math being dumbed down further knowing that it is because of those two things that got a laboratory to travel more than 350 million kilometres for eight months and land it within a 12 by 3 kilometre area virtually without human guidance.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
0 comments