Thursday, December 06, 2012

Curiosity


Four months ago today NASA landed the Curiosity vehicle on Mars, a planet about 60 million miles from Earth right now. The distance between the Earth and Mars varies between about 35 million and 250 million miles, which makes landing something on the red planet a tricky bit of astronomic calculation. I believe the feat is best described  with the phrase - "This is rocket science."

Here is a video of landing, not an artist rendition or a computer simulation but actual video footage from the spacecraft as it descends to the Martian surface.

And, of course, we have the NASA website with up-to-date photographs, videos from Curiosity on the surface of Mars. So it's been four months, have you taken a look recently? Do you have a sense of the significance of such scientific endeavors, yes even in the face of all the problems we have back here on this planet.

We live in incredibly interesting times, why not take a peek?


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