NASA Image of Curiosity
Note from Art: sometimes you have to just watch and marvel!
Against the backdrop of the world’s greatest athletes competing in London, there is an equally exciting and very other-worldly event occurring on a red planet somewhere near earth.
Whether it’s my lifetime love affair with Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles or a chance to marvel at this Olympics of Human Ingenuity on display, I cannot resist focusing on this remarkable event.
On Monday, if all goes according to plan, at about the time the Olympic athletes are digesting breakfast and warming up for their morning events, the rocket carrying the very sophistical robotic explorer (and chemistry lab) Curiosity, will execute a series of mind-boggling maneuvers, slowing from 13,200 miles per hour to 1.7 miles per hour and a gentle landing on the Martian surface. Wow! (During this seven-minute sequence of events, NASA indicates that Curiosity and the rocket will take on six different vehicle configurations and fire 76 pyrotechnic devices to support releases and adjustments.)
The expected images, including the descent to the surface and follow-on mission images will be remarkable. According to NASA’s press kit, the cameras mounted to curiosity will show images at a quality level that offers threefold the resolution of prior missions. Expect to see Mars in high-definition video and big, beautiful images in full color…mostly red, of course.
For those of us who watched Armstrong take that first step and then a few years later held our breath along with the world as the fate of the Apollo 13 astronauts played out, space travel of any sort is a big deal. If you choked up at the sight of Columbia’s first descent from space to a gentle runway landing, and if you know where you were when you heard of Challenger and Columbia, space travel is a big deal.
Exploring space is part of our destiny as humans. While machines are doing the heavy lifting for now (and maybe for the foreseeable future), the exploration must continue. Whether we’re alone or living in a universe filled with other neighborhoods, this is much like that step 43 years ago. It’s small in the context of the universe, but mighty big for all of us here on this pale blue dot.
Let’s go Curiosity! Stick the landing!
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