NASA's Curiosity rover lands in one hour!

Seems I'm perpetually late to the party... it already landed.

I am beyond excited that it actually went perfectly, though. Especially since the whole sky-crane idea, apart from being outrageously awesome, was one of the most complicated landing procedures ever attempted.

Now... time for SCIENCE!!!


These are pretty interesting times for astronomy enthousiasts. Despite the fact that it'll take 2 years, I'm already getting excited to see the first new data on Ceres and Pluto in 2015.

 

I remember vividly watching the first landing on the moon. Everyone was glued to the TV in open-mouthed awe.

It's all become so every-day now with the space-station and all, but I still haven't lost my fascination for it all.

About 10 years ago, I went to an IMAX theatre and watched a 3-D film of them building the International Space Station. Wow - I loved that - seeing the jelly beans floating towards me and the droplets of water floating into someone's mouth.

Mars seems the logical progression and I still have not lost my enthusiasm for space exploration.

With this though, is a touch of regret:

When I look and see what human-kind is capable of doing when we put our collective mind to it, it saddens me when I see that we can't even get along together very well sometimes. Having taught many Sikh children in London, I know how throroughly decent and hard-working most of their families are, how unconfrontational and peace-loving. I was very sad to hear of the attack on the gurdwara in Wisconsin. The sad thing is, that senseless killings like this happen all over the world with frightening frequency, based on misinformation, ignorance, bigotry and intolerance.

And yet we can fly to Mars and explore.

Go Curiosity! Go!(!)

 

I couldn't take the smile from my face the whole time as I waited for the landing; also, I don't think any movie, book, anything ever made (although I love literature) can build up as much suspense in me as that seven minutes and the readouts all the way through. In the end, I almost cried myself when I saw the NASA people crying, even though I kept thinking "why am I so excited? It's old news on Mars anyway"

@Bobbgooduk
I read one of the comments on twitter saying something like "There, we spend so much money on space exploration and on Earth children are dying". And I thought, truly, that's so sad.. there's a whole universe to explore and we keep on killing each other.

 

I love the fact that we can send these scientific rovers and all that, but what happened to the mission to put people on Mars? But since the Obama administration took over the White House, it seemed that NASA's goals were forced to change, why to save money?

You know I once read a book called Titan, and what the author predicted is actually all coming true. The author predicted that NASA's goal will change with a conservative president and that they will have less and less to do with anything that's space exploration side, instead they slowly militarised NASA until it did not exist any more.