Here’s one last photo from Curiosity’s first day, just to prove it really is up there on Mars:

(Considering how few people actually saw John Carter, I guess I ought to explain that the little critter there is Woola, a Martian calot — kind of a dog/frog thing — that takes a liking to the titular hero of the movie. Well, I thought it was funny, anyway… )

Not surprisingly, there’s an entire blog dedicated to this sort of thing, with everyone from Marvin the Martian to Ripley’s xenomorph to the yip-yip guys from Sesame Street photobombing Curiosity’s first view of the red planet. There’s some funny and clever stuff over there, but use caution if you’re checking it out at work, as the triple-breasted hooker from Total Recall makes an appearance as well…

I’m sitting here with my eyes burning from sitting up half the night watching the Mars landing, sipping my coffee and pretending I actually care today about errant hyphens, but the fatigue was worth it.

I know there are people out there, possibly even some of the people reading this, who don’t understand or share my enthusiasm about this space stuff. Too many problems back here on Earth we ought to be focusing on instead, they say. What a waste of two-and-a-half-billion dollars, they say, throwing a robot at another planet when times are so tough back here. We’ve got drought and unemployment and wildfires and starving people to worry about; why should we care about going to some other planet?

Well, to those people, I’d point out that the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Hoover Dam were all built at the height of the Great Depression. Like Curiosity, they were enormous feats of engineering and they cost enormous amounts of money that could’ve been spent helping all the people who were down on their luck at that time. I’m sure many people in the 1930s said the exact same things about them that people say about space exploration now. But they went up anyhow, employing thousands during their building and giving thousands more — if not millions — something to be proud of and to inspire them in their darkness. Today, those three structures are symbols of pride for our nation. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that Curiosity may someday be seen in the same light. People who’ve fallen on tough times need something larger than themselves to think about sometimes, as an escape from the grinding anxiety of their daily lives. I think that’s much of the reason why superhero movies are so popular; why shouldn’t people find relief from their worries in the grand adventure of exploration and science as well?

Anyhow, I’m too fuzzy-headed to go much farther with that, so let me instead just point you to a couple of interesting links I’ve run across:

• First, Wired.com offers a breakdown of the instruments onboard the Mars Science Laboratory, explaining what they are, how they work, and what they’re for. The bit with the lasers is especially cool.
• You want cool? How about this… a photo of Curiosity descending beneath its parachute taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Think about that: a robot space probe falling through the atmosphere of an alien world, photographed by another robot probe in orbit around that planet. And we did that. We built those things. We, those silly little hominids who not so long ago in geological time figured out that if you bang a rock against another one, you get a sharp edge, and that might be kinda useful.
• If you couldn’t stay up and watch the live feed from JPL the way I did, there are all kinds of videos to be found on YouTube. I thought this one was particularly interesting… clips from the control room are intercut with that simulation of the landing procedure, so you can get an idea of what the scientists and engineers are reacting to.
• And lastly, I couldn’t help but notice as the camera panned around the control room that things have loosened up considerably since the The Right Stuff era of skinny ties, white shirts, and uniform crew cuts… and isn’t that a grand thing? Steel-haired hippies and mohawks, oh my!

(I snagged this photo from here; not sure of its original provenance.)

And now I think another cup is in order… so very fuzzy…

Wow, what an incredible half-hour that was. That crazy damn contraption actually worked… Curiosity has landed safely and already sent its first photo home, helpfully relayed by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as it passed overhead, and I (and a whole lot of other folks, judging by the eruption of traffic on Twitter) watched it all live. Well, more or less… given the time delay, the actual events had already happened up there on that other world as we were sitting with our sweaty palms and dry mouths. But still… I was watching all those tense faces in the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, seeing their reactions in real time and feeling like I was sitting there myself as history was happening. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I often feel a little lost here in the 21st century, but at moments like this, when technology gives us the opportunity to share things like this with the people who are making it happen, and the people all over the world who also get excited by the thought of something we built setting down on another freaking planet… god, it’s all so amazing. It almost makes up for nonsense like whether or not eating mediocre fast-food chicken sends the proper political statement.

The official time of landing has been declared as 10:31 PM PDT, which worked out to 11:31 here in Salt Lake, just like we were told in advance. All the control-room chatter I’ve been overhearing suggests that all is well, and it sounds like there was even some fuel left in the Skycrane platform when it crashed down, so it’s not like this adventure was coming down to the wire. Wow. Just wow. If only we could’ve dropped some cameras in advance and seen the rover coming down on its cables below the hovering Skycrane! Maybe on the next mission.

And now I really ought to go to bed. Even though it’s going to be tough to sleep after that…

Incidentally, if anyone cares, here are my own tweets from this evening, most of which are restatements of things I was picking up from @MarsCuriosity, @NASA, and @PeterDiamandis (he’s the cat who founded the X Prize, the competition that brought us the historic flight of SpaceShipOne, the first privately owned craft to reach outer space, among other things). And of course I was listening to the video feed direct from JPL.

• Curiosity is now under its own onboard control, inside the orbit of Deimos and closing on Mars… accelerating to 13,000 mph! 10:27 PM
• Curiosity entry shell has separated from cruise stage; traveling at 13K mph; atmo in about 16 minutes… 11:17 PM
• Mars Recon Orbiter is in position to observe landing… we may get pictures! 5 minutes to atmo, “heartbeat” still coming in… 11:20 PM
• JPL control room guys eating peanuts for luck… a tradition going back to Ranger 7 in 1964… 11:22 PM
• Two minutes to atmo entry… heartbeat tones good. 11:23 PM
• Of course, given the timelag, all of this has already happened… how’s that for weird?  11:24 PM
• Seven minutes of terror begin… now! JPL guy is licking his lips a lot… 11:25 PM
• Passed through peak heating and accel. Still getting a signal… telemetry coming back! 11:26 PM
• Vehicle is down to mach 2. Heartbeat is loud and clear. 11:29 PM
• Parachute deployed! 11:29 PM
• Heat shield away… getting ready for powered flight 11:30 PM
• Powered flight! 11:31 PM
• Standing by for Skycrane… nice flat place located… 40 meters up. Skycrane started! 11:32 PM
• Tango delta nominal. Whatever that means 11:32 PM
• Touchdown!!!!!! The crowd goes wild!!!!!! 11:32 PM
• Images coming down… 11:34 PM
• Incredible! Pics of the wheels on the surface already, relayed by Mars Recon Orbiter (Odyssey). Many nerds crying at JPL. Me too. 11:39 PM
• Keep waiting for one of these guys to yell “It’s Miller time!” 11:42 PM

One final thought before I call it a night, something I retweeted from Rob Lowe, of all people (yes, that Rob Lowe):

• Let us be under no illusions: this country is still very capable of great feats that should inspire the world. #NASA #Curiosity
  

Amen, buddy, amen… I’m not what many people would consider “patriotic,” and I typically find big displays of jingoism and nationalism extremely distasteful, but when it comes to stuff like this, I am very, very proud of my country and a red-blooded American through and through.

This evening promises to be an exciting and nerve-wracking one for space buffs. If you haven’t heard — and if not, then just where in the hell have you been?! —  the rover Curiosity is due to land on Mars tonight at 1:31 AM Eastern time, or 11:31 PM here in Utah. Officially called the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity is in for a wild ride as it descends through the Martian atmosphere during one of the most complex landing procedures ever attempted. Curiosity is much larger and heavier than its predecessors Spirit and Opportunity, so the airbag system that cushioned those earlier rovers won’t work this time. Instead, this machine — which is about the size of a Mini Cooper automobile — will rely on the largest, toughest parachute ever deployed on another planet as well as a rocket-powered platform called the Skycrane, which is supposed to slow the whole package to a hover and then lower the rover to the surface on cables before zooming off to safely crash some distance away. And if all that isn’t anxiety-inducing enough, the landing will be entirely automated; radio signals take 14 minutes to travel between Earth and Mars, so there’s no way to interact with the probe in real time. Once the atmospheric entry begins, it will be entirely up to Curiosity’s onboard computers and the various mechanical components of the landing system to get her down in one piece. Those components have been tested back here on Earth, but they’ve never all functioned together as a unified whole. And tonight, there won’t be any second chances — everything has to work properly and at exactly the right time, or Curiosity goes splat. And remember that Mars has a nasty habit of eating space probes. We won’t even know if the landing was successful or not until long after it’s all over.

To help you picture how all this is supposed to work, here’s a helpful video narrated by actor, writer, blogger, and big-time geek — do I even have to mention he’s a Star Trek alum? — Wil Wheaton:

A journey of eight months and 350 million miles all coming down to a seven-minute window and something that’s never been done before… that’s drama. And drama like that is one the biggest reasons why I groove so much on space exploration. It’d be more exciting, of course, if there was a human being inside that aeroshell that even now is nearing the edge of the Martian atmosphere… but for now, I’ll live with our robotic proxies.

Godspeed, Curiosity!

Forty-three years ago today:

A couple weeks ago, I started following a site (not sure if you could call it a blog or a comic strip or what) called Zen Pencils: Cartoon Quotes from Inspirational Folks, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The proprietor, an artist called Gavin Aung Than, illustrates poems, speeches, witticisms, and observations made by admirable people, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Dalai Lama to Carl Sagan and Neil Gaiman. Normally this wouldn’t really be my thing, cynic that I am, but many of Gavin’s concepts are quite wonderful, and they’re all very well executed, without the sticky schmaltz that so often goes along with would-be inspirational stuff. I especially liked today‘s:

Great imagery in general, and the lighting effect on Goddard’s gravestone as the Saturn V raises the goose pimples on my arms. By coincidence — or maybe not — yesterday was the anniversary of Apollo 11’s launch; this coming Friday, the 20th, will mark 43 years since Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, the one we’re still trying to catch up to. Neat stuff…

James Lileks. His Daily Bleat was one of the first blogs I ever encountered, well over 10 years ago — man, that’s hard to process, that I’ve been reading blogs for over a decade — and I’ve been a more-or-less faithful reader ever since. But I have to confess, there have been times when I’ve been tempted to walk away from him for good. While I share his affinity for mid-20th century ephemera, architecture, and culture, he can be so bloody confounding at times. I disagree with his politics, and find him pretty unbearable when he veers into that domain; his frequent schtick of transcribing customer service encounters in minute detail has grown tiresome; his hatred of all things 1970s is tedious (I actually quite liked that decade; it was a good time to be a child); and his curmudgeonly attitude sometimes gets to be a little too much even for me, a fellow member of the august tribe of misanthropic “get off my lawn” types.

But then, just when I’m ready to pull the plug, he goes and writes something like this (he’s referring to last week’s news that the Voyager 1 space probe, launched in the landmark year 1977, is finally crossing the threshold from our solar system into interstellar space):

I’d like to think it’s not the last we’ve seen of it. If we build fast engines and get out there someday, someone will go looking for it. But it would be wrong to bring it home; that’s not its place. It would be a tourist attraction, like the ruins of an old colonial fort from the 17th century. Pass alongside, snap a picture: if you’ll look out the portside windows, we’re passing Voyager 1, which has a record containing the music of Chuck Berry and Beethoven. What haunts me is the idea that it will never be found, the record never be heard, and long after the sun has guttered out, the idea of Beethoven, unrealized, floats in an empty void, an arrangement of code.

As a would-be writer, I envy that paragraph. It’s an idea I wish I’d had, expressed more eloquently than I know I probably would. And as a space buff and a die-hard romantic, it makes me wistful. It’s a vision that I hope comes true. I can see it so clearly in my imagination: hundreds of passengers lining a futuristic version of a modern-day cruise ship’s promenade railing, pressing against floor-to-ceiling viewports that have been uncovered for just this occasion, straining to catch a glimpse of a historical treasure. The anticipation builds. A couple of people point excitedly at spots that turn out to be nothing at all, false sightings. Then the ship’s officers helpfully announce over the speakers where the crowd should look… and there it is, the legendary Flying Dutchman of space… a tiny, fragile-looking thing, pitted and scoured by centuries of exposure to interstellar dust and micrometeorites, glistening faintly like a dragonfly in the glare of the liner’s external floodlights. Its nuclear powercells are going cold, its transmitter no longer calls home, but somehow, improbably, it’s still going — still voyaging — ever outward…

I wish I could be there to see it, to experience a passage like that. Now that would be something to write about…

So I’m sure everyone heard about the transit-of-Venus thing that happened Tuesday, right? That once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event when the next planet inward from us passed between the Earth and the sun? Did you all manage to catch a glimpse of it? Well, good for you… The Girlfriend and I, on the other hand, got hosed. And considering this only happens every 105 years, I’m a little peeved about it.

I heard a couple days prior that our local planetarium was going to host a viewing party at the Gateway mall in Salt Lake. That’s only a couple blocks from my office, so I suggested Anne pick me up at quitting time and we drive over there for a quick peek, then go for dinner some place in the downtown area. A great plan… if only the weather had cooperated with us. When Anne arrived at my office, the skies were overcast and a cold wind was making it miserable to be outdoors. We still had a couple hours before sunset, so we decided to reverse our schedule, have dinner first and hope the clouds would break while we were eating. No such luck, though; we walked out of Sizzler an hour later beneath churning gray skies. But I wasn’t willing to give up yet… looking off to the west, toward the Gateway, I thought I could see a little patch of sunlight. Surely, I thought, that spot ought to be visible from the Gateway.

It took us a mere five minutes or so to drive across town and find a parking space. The viewing party — such as it was — was set up atop the broad concrete stairs overlooking the Olympic Fountain, an interactive water feature that commemorates the 2002 Winter Games that put Salt Lake City on the map. Not to mention Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. But that’s another blog entry.

There was but a single telescope there, a stubby, fat-barreled model presided over by three very dejected-looking young people. One of them stepped forward to meet us as we approached. Wrapped in a blanket, with a shaggy mane of dark hair and sporting a pointy Van Dyke-style beard with carefully waxed and curled mustachios, he gave the general appearance of a Spanish conquistador.

“Have you been able to see anything?” I asked, hoping he’d have a more hopeful answer than the one I anticipated.

“Nah, we’ve been here since four o’clock and we haven’t been able to see shit, man,” he replied.

Anne and I commiserated with him for a moment, then decided there wasn’t any point in pretending any longer. We thanked the conquistador for his time and wandered into the nearby Barnes and Noble, where we killed close to another hour browsing. We were disappointed to have missed the transit, but it’d been a long time since we’d been in a bookstore with nothing in particular to buy and nowhere in particular we needed to be. It seemed an adequate consolation prize.

The final insult remained to be delivered, though. When we finally made our purchases and left the bookstore, to our surprise, we found the plaza outside was awash in lovely, golden-hour light! The skies had cleared after all, just as we’d hoped they would, and the sun was setting directly in front of us, framed in the gap between the buildings across from where we’d spoken to the conquistador. Except… he and his science-loving buddies were gone. They’d evidently given up and called it a night, and they’d taken their telescope with them. So Anne and I were left with a perfect view, but no equipment through which to view it. We didn’t even have any of the specially filtered sunglasses the planetarium sells for viewing eclipses. Somewhere, I thought I heard quiet, mocking laughter. It might have been the little kid playing in the Olympic Fountain, oblivious to the chilly temperatures. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling myself.

The next transit is due on December 10, 2117. I suppose there’s always a chance that someone will develop a longevity serum in the next couple decades…

When I awoke last Friday morning, I thought I’d missed all the fun already, and would have to content myself with a YouTube replay of the Dragon spacecraft arriving at the International Space Station. But whether because I miscalculated my time zones (always a possibility; I can never figure out how Utah’s daylight savings time works with the other zones) or because the Dragon’s approach was delayed by a small problem with its laser rangefinding device, it turned out that I was in fact just in time to watch live as the ISS grappled the spacecraft with its robotic arm.

(If you haven’t followed the coverage closely, I should explain, briefly, that Dragon was not allowed to maneuver into the ISS’s docking port under its own power, as the space shuttle used to. Rather, it closed to within a certain distance and matched speeds with the station, so it appeared from the ISS to be standing still, and then the ISS reached out and grabbed hold of the capsule with the Canadarm2 manipulator, which, as you can see in the image above, is a beefier version of the Canadian-built robot arm used aboard the shuttles. After holding the Dragon for a time while some final checks were made, the multi-jointed arm then pulled the capsule down to a port where it was made secure with latching bolts. This operation is called “berthing,” as opposed to “docking,” which involves some different hardware and techniques.)

I must confess, my expectations of how this sort of thing is supposed to look have been honed by countless sci-fi movies and TV shows, which rarely waste precious screentime on what usually amounts to an establishing shot as far as the plot is concerned. Which means fictional spacecraft meeting up with each other are usually depicted as moving with the same mundane carelessness as a city bus pulling to the curb. But in real life, the process is much more cautious and methodical, i.e., everything… moves… very… slow…ly… And that means I got a wee bit impatient before it was all over. At one point, it appeared as if the grappling head had stopped moving altogether, and when the voice of mission control announced that there was only half a meter’s distance remaining — a mere foot and a half — I actually yelled at my monitor something to the effect of, “Oh, come on!” But at last the grapple snapped down over the fixture on the side of the capsule, and the historic message came down from the ISS: “Looks like we’ve got a Dragon by the tail.” And I felt a warm glow of cheer spread through my chest that I haven’t felt since the space shuttle Discovery blasted off on her post-Columbia disaster “return to flight” mission.

I had to switch off the computer at that point and get to work, and by the time I reached the office, Dragon was berthed. I intended to blog my thoughts about the event then, but naturally it was a busy day at work, as it always seems to be when something is going on that I really want to write about (it’s almost as if The Man knows). And a busy day led to a busy three-day weekend that blurred into another busy week. Meanwhile, high above our heads, the ISS crew had opened the connecting hatches and reported that Dragon had a “new-car smell” and looked “like a sci-fi filmset” inside, with its blue LED lights marking the deck (as opposed to the walls, difficult to distinguish when you’re floating in zero-g), before getting busy unloading the 1,100 pounds of food, water, clothing and equipment she’d brought up. This cargo was replaced with over 1,300 pounds of used equipment and other items scheduled for return to Earth, the first time the ISS has been able to send anything back since the last shuttle flight a year ago.

And then early yesterday morning, after nine days in space that seemed to pass with astonishing speed (at least from my perspective), Dragon was pushed away from the station by the Canadarm2, fired her thrusters to begin decelerating, and re-entered the atmosphere for a controlled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, a little under 600 miles west of Baja California. For old-timers and space buffs who know their history, the scene looked like a return to the glory days of Apollo, with the scorched capsule descending beneath fat, red-and-white-striped parachutes. Today, she’s on a barge that will return her to Long Beach, California. The capsule will need to be thoroughly inspected, of course, but as of right now, it looks like the mission was a flawless success, aside from that one glitch with the rangefinder. The demonstration phase is over; SpaceX has proven it’s up for the job of supporting the space station, and now hopes to fly the first of twelve contracted cargo runs to the ISS as early as this summer. Looking a little farther down the road, the plan is to fly the first humans aboard a Dragon capsule in 2015.

I’m sure everyone who doesn’t live and breathe this stuff is sick of hearing it, since every news article has said the same thing, but this point must be emphasized again: this mission was historic, as much so in its way as the Mercury missions or the first space shuttle flight. This was the first time a private company did what has previously been the sole province of national governments: they designed, built, and successfully demonstrated both a booster rocket and a functioning, useful spacecraft. Yes, NASA provided some seed money and the parameters to follow, but SpaceX, and in particular the company’s founder Elon Musk, essentially did this on their own. And while there are several other private companies aiming for the same goal, SpaceX got there first. A plucky little company comprising fewer than 2,000 employees, mostly enthusiastic young people from what I can see, has brought us into the age of commercial space travel. It’s a great story. And you know, as much as I love my space shuttles and wish there was still a role for them up there, even if it’s a much-reduced one from what they previously enjoyed, I’m overjoyed about this development. It means that somebody still wants to go up there and has the will to do it. And it opens up… possibilities. As depressed as I was about our future in space only a few months ago, today I am hopeful. Hopeful that in only a few short years, the skies will be filled with spacecraft — manned, reusable spacecraft — from a dozen private-industry firms, and that NASA is back in the big-idea business, and maybe, just maybe, the public gives a damn again about seeing what’s over the horizon…