In the midst of people complaining about NBC’s wretched coverage of the Olympics and my emotional investment in The Glass House while Steph was on the show, I neglected to write about something important that happened yesterday: the Curiosity rover landed on Mars. SCIENCE!
Twitter did me a great service that evening because I had completely forgotten about the landing, but because of all the tweets people were sending out, I logged onto the NASA website in time to watch the “seven minutes of terror”, the time between Curiosity entering Mars’ atmosphere and its landing on the surface. There was increasing applause for every step of the process (“This is happening as expected”) and a lot of cheering and hugging when it touched down. It was pretty intense and definitely an emotional moment.
So as a personal favor to me, take a breath and remember that the Olympic Games are just that: games. The participants are extraordinary athletes who have invested years of their lives working towards this one event. However, if you keep things in perspective, what they’re doing doesn’t seem nearly as impressive. As far as I know, Michael Phelps has yet to swim in outer space.
A lot of people probably don’t know and/or appreciate what just happened: extraordinary scientists, programmers and engineers invested years of their lives working towards sending the Curiosity rover to Mars. What they also might not know and/or appreciate is that people can use NASA’s website to follow what it’s doing, where it’s going and whether martians get pissed that we’re invading their neighborhood and blow it up. SCIENCE!
