Following fairly hot on the heels of the Higgs Boson/Field announcement was yesterday's successful martian landing of the Curiosity rover. I was reading a Cracked article this morning that summed it up rather cleanly with the following:
"We shot a robot from a moving object to another moving object that is at a varying distance of 35 to 235 million miles away."
Its mission will last for nearly two years, in which time it will look for traces of microbial life or potential fuel sources (we already found water). Along with CERN, this is a huge step in our understanding of the greatest and smallest parts of the comsos. So here's another opportunity for all of us to say Good Job Science for Globetrottering up a car-sized, laser-mounted robot laborotary, then jamming that thing 352 million miles across the blackness of space in order to vaporize some rocks to help us understand *things*.
Hard to watch reality TV or the Olympics faced with the grandeur of the universe, isn't it?
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