Is that a Mars Rover or a Lens Aberration?

As many of you know, I am a bit of a NASA geek. Always have been, always will be, probably. I was the geek in college who loved the fact that the university cable system had the NASA channel. I would leave it on sometimes, especially when there was a mission going on, and they would just be broadcasting live downlinks from the Shuttle, MIR, or later, ISS. I would always know when a launch or landing would be occurring and try to catch it live or on the webcast. I liked watching the people at Mission Control. Sure the astronauts were sexy and glamorous (this really is true, now that I have met and worked with some of them), but the folks in Mission Control were the geeks like me. That was why it was always so gut-wrenching to watch them after an accident, especially one involving a crewed vehicle. The people who fly are gutsy and brave, no doubt, but the folks behind the scenes that make it all work and work perfectly (or else people die) are the ones I really have respect for. Talk about having to take your job seriously...

One of the multitude of books I am reading right now is one called Roving Mars, written by Steve Squyres. Steve is a professor at Cornell and the lead scientist on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that have been on Mars now for over two years. That's right, the little rovers that could, the little rovers that were only designed to last 90 days are now pushing over 700 days on Mars and over 7 miles driven. I remember distinctly staying up on January 3rd two years ago, well past midnight, watching the landing team wait for Spirit to touch down at Gusev. It was an important moment, as the last two missions that NASA and JPL had sent to Mars had failed and failed rather embarrassingly. It still gives me chills to watch that landing, even though no one's life was even at stake. There is something inherently beautiful and romantic about space exploration. Discovery for discovery's sake. Because it is there. To paraphrase Kennedy, we don't do it because it is easy, we do it because it is hard. The risks are big (like shooting three-quarters of a billion dollars worth of hardware at the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 MPH and basically doing a controlled crash-landing with airbags in six minutes time), but the rewards are worth it if you pull it off. How many people can say that they landed a mission on Mars and got amazing science out of it? Precious few...

Two years later, and they are still going. Spirit even climbed a mountain, and the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft imaged it while it was at it's highest point. You see it, right? ;-)