I took Don Thrift’s Earth Science class as a ninth-grader at Rincon Valley Junior High. He touched on a number of “ologies” in that class, mostly geology and meteorology. It’s Mr. Thrift to blame for my fascination with weather and my often obsessive monitoring of annual rain fall wherever it is I happen to live. My contribution to the class was a paper on the Viking missions, the NASA probes which landed on Mars in 1976. I can’t reconcile how a report on planet tens of millions of miles from Earth made it into an Earth Science class, but it did.
My report, probably a near-verbatim retelling of the National Geographic articles I found during my “research,” was an extension of my NASA indoctrination early in my youth: the Apollo 11 moon landing, Jules Bergman’s reporting, Alan Shepherd playing golf, my playing with Maj. Matt Mason, eating space food sticks, and drinking Tang.
During the summer of 1997, some twenty years later, I remember being at Monica’s folks house watching excited engineers on television whoop and holler as the Mars Pathfinder successfully land on the Martian surface and in the ensuing weeks following reports of the little Sojourner rover doing its science thing.
And I still have the JPL web page for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity bookmarked (I keep wondering when Steve Squyres is gonna win the Nobel Prize).
I wasn’t terribly drawn into NASA’s Phoenix project, probably because Spirit and Opportunity were still chugging along at that point in time, and the Phoenix mission seemed–to me–narrow and short-lived, although the oven thing Phoenix had going on was a tad intriguing.
Call me a geek-I blame it on the Tang-but I am pumped about the NASA/JPL Mars Science Laboratory that launched this past weekend and is scheduled land on Mars in August of 2012. I had JPL’s “Curiosity cam” bookmarked the last few months; it was a web broadcast that was seemingly always on which allowed viewers to look in on the work engineers were doing on the MSL rover, Curiosity, which I might add, is pretty frickin’ big (10 feet long, 1,984 lbs.) relative to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (five feet long, 400 lbs.) and is gigantic when compared to Sojourner (two feet long, 23 lbs.).
Here’s some NASA/JPL animation showing how the MSL, if all goes according to plan, will be deployed to Martian surface and how it will conduct its science:
I can’t wait. ;>
