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 21st 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”
