Friends,
I’m woozy. I stayed up way past my bed time to watch NASA drop the most expensive compact car on a planet 140 million miles away and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the feat. The landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars represents the triumph of screwy ideas that help me feel better about the dumb crap we all cook up every day…
- Okay, so you’re going to enter orbit with a pie plate on top of a saucer that you need to steer. How about putting a bunch of weights on one end, then spinning the thing around so the wobbly end shifts from side to side, like a wakeboard on the atmosphere?
- Rockets are cool and everything, but we’ve gotta slow down. I know! How about the biggest damn parachute ever?
- Man, that heat shield is still pretty hot. Too hot for cameras, but we need to see the ground. Blow the bottom off with explosives and let the rover look at stuff!
- Crap! Still too fast! Now how about some rockets? Throw the whole pie tin away and fly the rover with a rocket pack on its back!
- Rockets? They’re gonna leave an awful lot of mess around. How about dropping the rover from the rockets on cables? (And by the way, I will be peppering my daily speech with, “initiating Sky Crane maneuver” from now on.)
- Rover’s on the ground, so that’s nice, but won’t the rocket pack crash down on the thing? Nope! We’re going to sever the cables with explosives! Then we’re going to crash the rocket pack over there. Where? Oh, you know, over there. Safely over there.
And there you have it. Exquisite madness to gently drop a ton of car on another planet. I believe it was Archimedes who said, “Give me a lever long enough and I can move a mountain, give me a big box of explosives and I’ll put a robot on Mars.” Here’s to the lunatics at JPL for a job well done.
Your pal,
– bob
P.S. Next, let’s talk about the implications for us here on this planet if Curiosity finds life on that other planet. Should be fun!