Science writer Jacob Margolis chronicled the end for the proud little rover. The last thing they heard from the rover was "My battery is low and it's getting dark." That is some Hollywood level drama, man. Well, it did a great job anyway, and lasted for waaaaaaay longer than we expected. Good rover.
Mars
When this fed up woman took to Twitter to express how she feels about wanting to head to Mars to get away from men, Elon Musk ended up getting involved in some sweet, pillow talk with Mars about just how badly they want each other. It would seem her unrest gave way to something beautiful between a big 'ol red planet, and Mr. Elon Musk himself, and for that, we are grateful. What a time to be alive.
A few days ago the NASA InSight landed on Mars. This makes eight times NASA's successfully landed it's hyper-developed space machinery on the angry red planet. Naturally, the rest of the internet honed in on the notably grainy quality of the first pic sent back to earth from Mars. It was just too damn ripe for the taking.
Via NASA
According to NASA's article on the test, this is a big step toward sending a manned mission to Mars:
NASA successfully tested the first deep space RS-25 rocket engine for 500 seconds March 10, clearing a major milestone toward the next great era of space exploration. The next time rocket engine No. 2059 fires for that length of time, it will be carrying humans on their first deep-space mission in more than 45 years.
This is all part of a plan to send humans to Mars by 2030, which NASA has laid out in this beautifully illustrated image:
Via NASA
In case you were curious, here is what an alien sees before he/she/it goes to sleep.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured the above image on April 15, and it’s being described as the first sunset observed in color by the spacecraft.
The photos were taken last month, but they were just sent back to Earth last week.
While Mars may appear red, the sunset is actually blue, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains why this is possible:
Dust in the Martian atmosphere has fine particles that permit blue light to penetrate the atmosphere more efficiently than longer-wavelength colors. That causes the blue colors in the mixed light coming from the sun to stay closer to sun’s part of the sky, compared to the wider scattering of yellow and red colors. The effect is most pronounced near sunset, when light from the sun passes through a longer path in the atmosphere than it does at mid-day.
Curiosity first landed on Mars’s Gale Crater in August 2012 with a mission of determining whether or not Mars is or ever was habitable by life forms.
Here’s an animated GIF of the sunset, which uses a series of photos takes over a period of about 6 minutes, 51 seconds. The sight apprently inspired the rover to recite some lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on its Twitter account.
Badass astronaut and second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin has recently taken to wearing an appropriately badass shirt while making the news rounds to support America beefing up space exploration funding.
