So cool.
That’s insane. It’s shame Mars itself is so boring.
Is it really? Another planet, boring?
Well it’s no Barsoom.
As other planets go, the main things it has to recommend it are that it’s close, (relatively) easy to study, and that it used to resemble Earth. Personally, I think Venus is much more interesting, but also by its nature much harder to explore.
Then again, as my dissertation evidences, I’m really more of a nebula guy. ;)
I should, however, emphasize that exploring any planet is pretty cool, and putting a helicopter on another planet is very cool.
So where does the part that flies away end up?
Somewhere else on the ground - it “flies away” to keep it from accidentally landing on the rover itself as I understand it. Visually, at least, this is extremely similar to the insertion method for Curiosity. Fingers crossed it goes as smoothly.
Having been watching SpaceX slam rockets into the launchpad I’m a bit nervous :/
You do know that the chance of you dying in a rocket crash is pretty small.
Outer Wilds says different!
Imagine if we found a solar system with three inner rocky planets in the habitable zone with water on the surface? Three or four billion years ago that would have been ours. But chances of staying habitable are extremely remote it appears:
(Study here: Chance played a role in determining whether Earth stayed habitable | Communications Earth & Environment
Scientists at the University of Southampton have carried out a mass simulation of climate evolution of 100,000 randomly generated planets.
Each planet was simulated 100 times with random climate-altering events occurring each time in order to see if habitable life could be sustained for three billion years like on Earth.
Of these planets, 9 per cent (8,700) were successful at least once but, of those, nearly all (about 8,000) were successful fewer than 50 times out of 100 and most (about 4,500) were successful fewer than 10 times out of 100.
Yup. When I teach the topic in astro 101 it really does end up being a Goldilocks thing, Venus was too hot, Mars was too cold, Earth as it happens was just right. That’s oversimplifying of course, mass and composition play into it hugely as do countless other factors and the whole topic is surprisingly complex (and still actively being studied of course).
But yeah, Mars’ early history is, IMO, far more interesting than its current state.
It would be bad news to make it all the way to Mars and land on its surface only to be crushed by your descent vehicle.
I know how you feel! Remember when exoplanets were all the rage? I was going through my galaxy clusters and dark matter interaction phase, and just could. not. care. less. about exoplanet exploration. We found planets surrounding other stars? UNPRECEDENTED. /eyeroll
Yeah, that would be embarrassing for sure.
Glad I wasn’t the only one. :) I still don’t enjoy teaching the “Solar System Astronomy” class (which is mostly about planets) nearly so much as the “Stars and Galaxies Astronomy” class, which is where all the fun stuff (nebulae, stars, galaxies, cosmology) is at. I can ramble on about just about any topic in the latter for hours. It was especially cool to be teaching it when the M87 supermassive black hole image came out. We spent a week just on that.
I do wish Perseverance weren’t landing smack in the middle of an exam week for me, I’d probably point my physics classes to it as an interesting case of applied force/motion/energy etc. I mean, I still will, but I can’t really do anything during class with it unfortunately.
I mean… you could cancel class like a cool prof… ;)
Is this a direct atmospheric insertion from Mars transfer, like Curiosity was?
Moving tests is problematic for a number of reasons. I wouldn’t cancel class under any circumstances (my physics courses are WAY too stuffed with required content - gotta hit those accreditation metrics) but I’d take out a little time to talk about it if it were on a non-test day. As it stands, I’ll just have to point them to it as a fun after-test activity for those interested.
If I were teaching astronomy, which has much looser requirements, I’d probably build a whole class around it that day.
It is!