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Look, it’s been an awful week. Winter storms have caused power outages and chaos from Oregon to Texas. Answer All cohost PJ Vogt and others resigned following allegations of poison culture at Gimlet Media. Unemployment continues to rise. And that just showers off the top of the hips. At the same time, there was no ton of pop culture to distract from newcomers Mortal Kombat and Cruella. TV looked scarce too, except for one thing: the rover Mars landing.
The idea of traveling to the outdoors is perhaps even more bizarre when, these days, so few people are leaving our neighborhoods, but really looking a zenith of Sustainability’s mission was everything you needed to watch TV. For one, many expected. The Atlas V rocket carrying NASA’s latest Mars rover was launched from the Florida Kennedy Space Center in July and has spent the next six months on its way to the Red Planet. There were cool tools too: Perseverance is a 2,300-pound nuclear-powered rover tasked with studying the martian landscape for signs of microbial age. Put another way, it was a “hunting alien self-driving car,” and for an extra hour NASA was rescuing its descendants on the live stream, it did so using interviews. with very enthusiastic scientists and animators (read: nerdy fun) that seemed like something out of it An Expanse. So sci-fi!
Covid-19 angle? That was at the Perseverance live show as well. NASA’s Jet Delegation Laboratory had to start teleworking back on March 12 last year and has been doing the work under Covid’s safety protocols ever since. (Rocket scientists – they’re just like us!) He also had a special cameo: a microphone designed to capture the sounds of life on Mars, something no probe has done before.
But what made the route so suspicious was that it literally promised “seven minutes of horror.” As the rover approached Mars yesterday, the supersonic parachute slowed down its descent, and was replaced by its “sky mast”. It was great to watch it happen. Literally. I lost two nails. It was a lot to watch scientists watch screens, but to see their well-being and impurity as years of their work went through space was as hard as it got. Ron Howard could never.
The excitement may just be due to the fact, to me at least, that the kind of human happiness displayed at JPL after the rover rubbed down something that was not, in fact, seen in soon. Or maybe he gets a glimpse of a room full of government workers, all with masks – mostly even with double masks – working together to solve a problem. Either way, there’s something about watching it happen live just a click. For months now, fiction – whether in the form of movies, books or TV – has been an escape when watching the news is too much. For six minutes Thursday, living on Earth got a little more amazing, by giving us a glimpse of life elsewhere.
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