Mars Science Laboratory

So remember when I got to see the landing capsule for the MSL that is going to launch next October? They're about to put all of the "Russian doll" pieces together and ship it to the East Coast. Here are all the pieces, scattered around the bay.

To the left, behind the ladder, and with all the boxes on it, is the rover. To the right is the landing capsule with huge propulsion tanks to help guide the landing.

Close up of the rover ... doesn't really look like much!

This is what it will look like while roving Mars:

Here is a comparison of the sizes. [I had them wrong before] The little guy is the size of Mars Pathfinder. The middle sized one is the size of Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers that were expected to last 90 days but have been there 5 years. The biggest is MSL, who may be exploring the elements of Mars for 10 or more years.

The shell ... it can withstand a lot of pressure to enter the atmosphere.

I just realized that this is not a picture of MSL. My signature will be on Mars anyway though, but on MSL, not Pathfinder.

I went to a talk today about MSL. It sounds like a really cool mission. There are parts from many different countries, all collaborating to build an amazing science machine. It is going to land in an area that they think might have sustained life at one point. They have not decided which point yet. Once it's there it can shoot things with a laser to vaporize the minerals and test them to see if they're worth further analysis. It will be able to video record things. It has a device that does something like run x-rays through elements to figure out their composition. I don't really know... this is the process I referred to as making "God's thumbprint" in my previous post because Rachael went to a talk where some scientist tried to prove that the rings made through this process is proof of God. That's the gist of it, but there are a lot more cool things about it.

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Today was a really good day for me. I began not knowing much about what I was doing and how to get the information I wanted. By the end of the day I had a beautiful graph, altered the axes accordingly, and made code to run it into a program for every file I have. As accomplished as I feel about doing this, I can't figure out how to get a PostScript file into an image file to show my progress. Maybe another day.