The Curiosity rover has landed safely on MARS, we have seen the image of the wheel on the surface. There were good reasons to doubt the "Sky crane" approach to a landing. Just one computer glitch, just one wrong calculation, just one strange interaction of various systems and the story would be different.
The difficulty of this has been compared in recent days to "sticking the dismount" in gymnastics. This is that times a million. It's like making a robot that can do the routine and land on it's feet, based only on its AI, while falling from space! It was a perfect 20*.
NASA was slated for serious budget cuts in the coming years. Hopefully this will have ensured more generous funding for them, and for other big science projects in the United States of America, and the world. Perhaps the team that discovered the Higgs Boson should have a bit of competition for the Nobel? This is that big of an achievement.
Congratulations to everyone involved.
*Before anyone asks, international gymnastics does not use the scale from 1-10 anymore.
The difficulty of this has been compared in recent days to "sticking the dismount" in gymnastics. This is that times a million. It's like making a robot that can do the routine and land on it's feet, based only on its AI, while falling from space! It was a perfect 20*.
NASA was slated for serious budget cuts in the coming years. Hopefully this will have ensured more generous funding for them, and for other big science projects in the United States of America, and the world. Perhaps the team that discovered the Higgs Boson should have a bit of competition for the Nobel? This is that big of an achievement.
Congratulations to everyone involved.
*Before anyone asks, international gymnastics does not use the scale from 1-10 anymore.
