Four weeks
ago or so, NASA’s JPL successfully landed the rover “Curiosity” (wikipedia) on Mars. The landing was probably one of the most watched (and celebrated) events on the Internet, witness the many gifs of cheering NASA people (Happy NASA guy and Happy NASA people) and the pop-rock-star treatment of the NASA engineers at Reddit (“We’re engineers and scientists on the Mars rover mission”).
As any major news event that at one time broke the Internets, news and interest in the Curiosity rover is slowly dwindling down. However, great photos and mission details are posted on Curiosity’s main site at NASA (MSL website). My favourite one is the movie about the landing (taken from images from the one of the rover’s cameras), which thanks to the Internet, was then made into a HD 25 fps movie, which you can watch right on Youtube. If you like hi-res images of anything but Mars, go here.
I’ve always been a proponent of unmanned flight as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts years ago. The risk of losing a rover is worth less than the risk of losing people in extremely dangerous environments.
NASA’s MSL project is supposed to last a year. No doubt, the rover will keep trucking for a long time after that.