Yay!
As amazing as that is, to send a hunk of metal, the size of a Honda, millions of miles into space (33 to be kind of exact) and hit something half the size of Earth, I mean fuck here, why do we care about skeet shooting or archery at the Olympics when this truly is marksmanship.
I can't even throw a sock at a hamper and make it 90% of the time.
Some might say, "But This whole Mars thing been done before 6 times, why should I care."
Parents around the world would answer, "Just because," the interesting part to me is the blackout that occurs when the probe actually gets there.
Percentage wise its not in our favor to be successful. Out of the six attempts to litter the surface of Mars maybe 3 worked out.
They found some of the wreckage of the others through the lenses of telescopes.
So golly gee shit this is amazing.
All sarcasm aside why I write about this event is that for seven minutes these... what? scientists? I guess thats what they are but it seems to diminish it slightly. These arm-chair astronauts, no... thats even worse... cosmic quarterbacks (ding!) fling a 3 ton hunk of metal through a tire with a diameter of 7 miles 33 million miles away and for the last seven minutes have to give up all control.
As that 2.5 billion dollar ball hurtles towards Mars NASA can watch it and make little adjustments five minutes into the future. They cottle it and stroke it and nudge it towards its dusty destination.
Its kind of cheating.
What would Tebow give to be able to adjust his throw mid air, tighten the spiral, adjust the trajectory, speed it up or slow it down, I bet he would give up... never mind I bet that guy would call this cheating, but even if he didn't consider it cheating and had the ability, what if after the ball actually went airborne and he had all this control over its motion to guarantee success, he then had in the last few moments to wait to see what would happen.
Would the receiver even open his arms to catch the ball?
Would the ball bounce off the receivers chest?
Would a defensive player come and snatch it away at the last minute?
Nasa today is going through just this.
After all the control for 7 minutes NASA has only what they put into the effort to achieve this landing.
To bankroll the investment.
They input all the numbers, and now it is up to the machine to do its job on the other side. Either the recycling of many little tiny pieces of metal will need to be accomplished or a new rover will be putting around on the planet mars.
My tiny brain can't even fathom the details.
Fingers crossed!
And maybe in four years Mars rover landing can be team event at the Rio olympics.
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