The greatest machine ever built

I will start this off by saying that I grew up fascinated by NASA and the space program. As a kid I found myself in a house where we had National Geographic books on the planets and the space program and a promise that we would be to Mars by the start of the 21^st Century. While the last part hasn’t come true and my dream of working for NASA is yet unfulfilled I have been able to watch with great interest what they have been able to accomplish. This weekend marked what I feel is one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind and I am not being facetious here. The Opportunity rover has just completed ten years of continual service on the Martian surface.

This is without a doubt the greatest machine that we have ever built with its twin Spirit close behind. Let’s walk through the entire engineering of this entire project. First, it is launched by rocket from Earth to Mars which is a trip of about 60 million miles give or take the effects of general relativity. Yes, on this scale you usually need to take into account both Einstein and Newton when trying to calculate the physics. Then, once you made this trip and the ship is in orbit they drop the lander to the surface, which in those days was done with the wonderful “Let’s just enclose the entire thing in bubble wrap and drop it to the ground” method. It was actually one of the most ingenious solutions to landing a spacecraft on another planet ever developed. They wrapped the entire things in airbags and dropped it to the surface, letting it bounce a bunch but surviving the trip in one piece.

Then once the rover was able to roll out onto the surface it started its 90 day mission. Yes, that is how long the mission was scheduled (and more importantly, budgeted) for. It was assumed that after 90 days the solar panels would become covered with dust and the rover would shut down. Except that didn’t happen at all. Opportunity kept on roaming across Mars, examining rocks, finding meteorites on Mars and giving us a view of daily life on a planet so far away that it takes four minutes to send information back and forth.

Every once in a while I think we need to look up at the sky and just think about what we have done. If you have a star map, live away from a lot of city lights and are incredibly bored you can look up at the night sky and see Mars. It is just a bright dot in the sky. But we sent a machine there and for ten years it has been rolling around the planet. Without any way to repair it, without any way to control its environment, on a planet that we can’t really imagine what it is like, we’ve built a rover that has lasted longer than any car that I have ever owned. If that isn’t amazing I don’t know what is.

There is so much of modern technology that is now taken for granted. My phone has more computing power than almost all of the computers that I have ever owned combined. We can speak to anyone around the planet on a moment’s notice and there isn’t a fact that can’t be gathered in ten seconds from Google or Wikipedia. That has caused us to lose a lot of our sense of wonder. But look up at the sky at that dot and realize that we put a rover there and it is still going.

When we land on Mars (and I hope I will see that in my lifetime) I hope that one of our goals will be to recover Spirit and Opportunity and bring them home for a hero’s welcome. They deserve it.

Best of 120 Minutes: Speaking of people taking things for granted back when I was a teenager getting our hands on Anime was a dream of almost mythic proportions. We were happy to have Voltron and Battle of the Planets and we knew there was a whole world of cartoons that were nothing like Hannah-Barbara. Matthew Sweet helped to make anime mainstream by using Space Adventure Cobra as the background for his Girlfriend video. This, along with using a picture of Tuesday Weld as the cover of the album, makes his entire career worthwhile.

The Five Random CDs for the Week:

I’m starting this back up again. Admittedly it is no longer on CD but through my iPod but I am going through my entire music collection five albums at a time. Completion time will take something like three years at the current pace.

1)      Neko Case and Her Boyfriends “Furnace Room Lullaby”

2)      Drovers “Blink”

3)      Tori Amos “Little Earthquakes”

4)      Matt Nathanson “At the Point”

5)      Amy Farris “Anyway”