A bunch of people wearing blue shirts doing very bad calisthenics and shouting.
Curiosity has landed on Mars.
NASA's madcap rocket-powered crane has done its job and buggered off to crash somewhere.
And the rover is okay.
What did it do first?
Well it's part of the Facebook generation, so it did what any drunk holidaymaker would do and took photos of itself and sent them to its friends.
Then it Tweeted.
Geeks have reached the Red Planet. Martians beware.
8 comments:
You are too damn funny - sitting in your boxers, sipping orange juice to watch this extraordinary feat! And you type funny, too. Makes me laugh.
I found the NASA feed this weekend, then turned it on early Sunday evening to follow commentary. I was afraid I'd miss the landing if I didn't. Yay! I smiled back at my computer screen, proud and happy as hell. I found it touching that the blue-shirted folk have so much of themselves invested in the project that they referred to the functioning beeps the craft sent back as "heartbeats."
Those people invest years - sometimes decades - of their lives in a single project. Most projects never even make it off the ground, so I had a tear in my eye watching them leap about and yell and hug this morning.
I often sit and watch NASA TV just to see the folk up in the International Space Station going about their daily routine as if it's perfectly normal to be in space.
I love it!
I even watch the Mission Control live feeds sometimes, if only to remind myself that had I taken my alternative career path into physics and astrophysics I'd be earning even less than I am now.
A few years back - well, longer than that, but it still seems recent - Carl and I visited Mission Control in Houston. You know, the one we grew up with on TV and in 'The Right Stuff.' It is so small! And black dial telephones w/a computer system, the power of which you and I today probably have on our laptops alone! It's as though we sent men into space and to the moon and back using tin cans, string, and aluminum foil hats. Those folks were really, really good at math. Still are, given last night's result.
Apollo 11 was powered by a computer with a staggering 2k of memory, Speedway. Yup: TWO whole kilobytes. Enough to write a couple of characters on your home computer.
Here's the geek gen: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/07/20/how-powerful-was-the-apollo-11-computer/
NASA is the one thing (other than the Civil Rights movement) that the rest of the world loves about the USA. Be justifiably proud, and lobby your Congressman for more funding.
We watched it, too--wse can practically see JPL from our house and we feel some pride of ownership, though of course we have none at all. But it was thrilling. They have the expertise to put humans on mars but so little funding that this is what they can do. And they did it beautifully.
Plus I love their matching shirts.
Sad to relate I wore a matching blue shirt today in celebration, Petrea.
I am SO jealous of you living so close to a place where I've always wanted to work.
To help with your pride of ownership, please lobby your Congressman for more funding for NASA; they've been stripped to the bone in recent years. Some of that defence spending or some of the rich folks' unpaid taxes would help a lot.
It was thrilling to watch. Amazing to think of the space program and what it has accomplished over the years.
I wish these weren't such times of govt "austerity"....
Yup; austerity for everyone but the rich and the military. Shameful.
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