Mars 2020 Perseverance

Wow during this Pandemic, Climate Change, Fake News, Inequity, it is hard to remember some of the good things in life. While it might be a huge long-term, not very clear use of money, it does inspire to think about the achievements that show the hope for the future. ICMYI, quite a lot of amazing technie things happened last week.

First of all Perseverance landed successfully on Mars. It is a pretty incredible technical achievement and land remote from 160km to a gentle touchdown in seven minutes.

And of course, the name Perseverance was selected based on 28,000 essays from students and the winning essay is incredibly stirring. Hear Alex Mather, a then seventh grader, reads it

YouTube player — Alex Mather reads his winning essay

Curiosity. Insight. Spirit. Opportunity. If you think about it all of these names of past Mars Rovers are qualities we possess as humans.
Alex MAther, Name Mars rover 2020 contest

We are always curious and seek opportunity. We have the spirit and insight to explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond, but if Rovers are to be the qualities of us as a race, we missed the most important thing, perseverance. We, as humans, evolved as creatures who could learn to adapt to any situation, no matter how harsh. We are a species of explorers and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars, however, we can persevere, we, not as a nation, but as humans, will not git up. The human will always persevere into the future.

For power nerds, this is a long two hour video of the actual landing as seen by Mission Control. We’ve watched this twice now and it is incredibly gripping (for a power nerd who loved The Martian, Interstellar, Apollo 13,…)

AFter the fact, they actually got high-resolution video so you can see exactly what the landing was like at 11km above the surface:

And if you want to see the first video and audio ever from Mars, here it is after the landing

Finally, for the true nerds, you can be depressed the official NASA Polo shirts are stocked out and then watch NASA TV all the time, for the power nerds or the insomniacs of the crowd: