RAV.F | Mars Curiosity

So why spend all of that time and money only to have more Mars missions fail than succeed? Because the benefits far outweigh the failures.  Also, every time there is a failure, we learn from whatever it was that didn’t work. Thomas Edison is quoted as saying “I didn’t fail to make a light bulb a thousand times, I just found a thousand ways how to not make a light bulb.”  With that in mind, you can look at mission failures as twenty-eight ways to not get to Mars helps you figure out nineteen ways to succeed!

Great, so we’ve managed nineteen successful missions. So what?  What was so important about Mars? What have we learned and what does it matter to us here on Earth?  Isn’t Mars a big cold desert planet that doesn’t even have an atmosphere?

It is…today.

Life on Mars

But scientists believe that billions of years ago Mars actually had quite a bit of surface water that, in theory, could have supported life.  Again, what does that mean today, here on Earth? What matters is that we try to learn what happened to all of that water, and why the atmosphere is now so thin.  Could life have existed? Why does that matter? Because if life existed there once, it might exist there again, or (while not very likely), might exist still. 

This is important to learn because while the Earth seems like a big place, it’s actually quite small in the greater scheme of things.  The population today is about seven and a half billion people. In 1950, it was two and a half billion, and it’s estimated that by 2050 it will be close to ten billion people. That’s a lot of people to feed and house, a problem that we have today. 

As a species, humanity needs room to spread out, stretch out our legs.  We’re explorers, back as far as humanity has existed. It’s part of what helped us to evolve from early ape ancestors who developed an upright gait so that they could walk long distances to a spacefaring species that is seriously exploring ways to colonize other planets in our solar system and someday, if we can continue to learn from our robot explorers, far beyond this neighbourhood and out to the stars beyond our own.

Happy Birthday!

We mentioned at the beginning that Curiosity once sang Happy Birthday to itself on the surface of Mars.  Now, that may seem like a very lonely way to spend your birthday, fifty-four million kilometers from home, but here are two things that may take the sorrow from that story: first, Curiosity is a robot and isn’t programmed with feelings, and second, it was an amazing feat of engineering.

It would have been seriously weird for NASA to spend extra money on giving Curiosity a speaker that would broadcast the old birthday standard to no one, and that would have honestly been really sad, so they didn’t.  What they did in instead was really cool. 

Curiosity is a rolling science lab, and testing the soil is one of its main jobs. To perform this task, Curiosity has a small arm that takes a pinch of soil from the surface and drops it into a little receiver and when it does, the arm does a little shake to sift out the sample.  When it does this, the arm vibrates at different frequencies – you know that sound robots make in sci-fi movies when they walk?

Curiosity’s arm does the same thing, and the engineers noted that it makes different sounds–different frequencies–depending on what it’s doing.  So, in 2013, they worked out a series of movements that created “musical” notes, allowing Curiosity to hum, more than sing, the song “Happy Birthday” in order to celebrate the anniversary of its first full year on our red neighbour.

Okay, yeah, it’s pretty cool but maybe still a little sad.  Maybe one of the first manned missions to Mars should go throw Curiosity a little party when they get there.