Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Wading Pool
It's very cool that Opportunity found signs of flowing water on Mars. It doesn't matter, I suppose, whether or not the little area the rover is in had a 1,000 feet of it or if it was ankle-deep. It's still pretty cool. And hats off to those engineers who can drive around this little machine on Mars, and give it all these spectrometers and cameras, and have it look at some rocks with these spectrometers and cameras to determine that yes, this is the evidence for water.
I'm often amazed at some of the stuff people come up with. I mean, how amazing is it that people have invented all the technologies to do these things? There are truly so many different technologies that had to be implemented to even get the rovers there, too many even to list, from those it took to develop and conceptualize the programs, to those it took to manufacture the machines, to those we needed to blast the little jobbers into the sky, and to land them, etc. It has taken a long time to get these things to where they are. I know it's all a gradual process, but this is, really, the culmination of so many different scientific and ballistic and communication and computer technologies.
When you look at it that way, it seems almost silly that we don't really hope for the things to work for longer than 90 days. It's very good, then, that they're fulfilling their objectives so early in the missions.
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