NASA Sparks Curiosity on Mars

Remember the feeling of amazement? It’s a natural state for children, for whom every experience is new. Imagine yourself as a child in a bright-white candy store—with great tubes filled with colored gumballs, flower-like arrangements of lollypops, and bins of sparkling rock candy. Or picture your childhood self at a theme park, holding a funnel cake, surrounded by joyous laughter and the steel skeletons of thrill rides.

As adults, we’re often so busy that we don’t allow ourselves time to be amazed. Awe requires pause, awareness, and reflection. But I think it’s important for us to be affected sometimes, to acknowledge when something is astonishing.

Yesterday, NASA landed its ambitious Curiosity rover on Mars. Over the past few months, I’ve followed the mission loosely. It’s fascinating to me to think of hundreds of the world’s best technicians and scientists collaborating. There’s no shortage of politics about NASA and its future funding, but it’s incredible to think about how NASA continues to redefine the possible.

Here are some cool tidbits pulled from the Curiosity landing press kit:

• Between when it launched in November of last year and the time it landed, Curiosity traveled 154 million miles.
• The Curiosity rover weighs 1,982 pounds. It is essentially a science lab on wheels. Among other things, it contains an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, a Radiation Assessment Detector, and a Rover Environmental Monitoring Station. It will send data to Earth on a regular basis.
• NASA labeled the Curiosity landing the “Seven Minutes of Terror.”
• Curiosity will spend at least 98 Earth weeks (a Mars year) conducting tests on the surface of Mars.

I consider NASA’s Curiosity rover mission a remarkable achievement, and a great example of the possibilities of human ambition. But all technical notes aside, one thing brought out my inner child most. It’s a video posted on NASA’s website, which I happened to see first, months ago, when I first learned about the mission. The video is a computer-animated depiction of the Curiosity rover mission. The landing starts about a minute in, but the entire 11-minute video is incredible.

Think about it: we have the ability to imagine, create, and do. That’s amazing.

Have you been following the Curiosity mission? What amazed you most today? What do you want to accomplish? Please post your comments below.

Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls