A decade ago it was a sky crane, a a mohawk NASA engineer named Bobak and a $2.5 billion rover call Curiosity which took my career in a new direction.
I was mainly taken by the high-resolution pictures that NASA’s most advanced rover sent back from its new permanent home on Mars. At that time, for the first time in human history, Earth was suddenly a world full of photos of almost everything and everyone, thanks to smartphones. But the stark pictures of a completely empty world felt the most meaningful to me, for reasons I still struggle to put into words 10 years later.
Late on Sunday evening, August 5, 2012 — the eve of my 33rd birthday — I braced myself with the rest of humanity as NASA performed an unprecedented maneuver using a system called a sky crane to bring down the -a very advanced mobile martian laboratory to the surface of the red planet. Basically, a special descent system hovered just above the ground, lowered Curiosity on cables, detached and flew away to crash land at a safe distance.
NASA called the high-stakes landing “seven minutes of horror.” If it doesn’t work perfectly, years of engineering work and billions of dollars will be wasted.
Curiosity’s autonomous “seven minutes of terror” (photos)
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Of course, it did work, and in the process, mission control cameras caught Flight Director Bobak Ferdowsi working his trademark mohawk and catapulted him to viral internet fame.
In a strange way, Ferdowsi – aka “NASA’s Mohawk Guy” – became the image most associated with the Curiosity landing.
But I was blown away by the images coming from Mars even before Curiosity landed. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter returned a photo of the rover parachuting through the thin Martian atmosphere, with the stark, barren landscape of another planet below as a backdrop.
Remember, this was 2012. The iPhone had only been around for five years. As a tech journalist, my days have been consumed by the battle for smartphone supremacy between Apple and Android, the rise of Instagram, and the current shocking amount of excitement about something called Google glasses.
Mobile and social revolutions were literally eating up the world, even helping to topple oppressive regimes in the Arab Spring the previous year.
Yet such inspirational stories began to seem to me more like the exception that proved the rule: social platforms, coupled with ubiquitous devices with not one but two cameras, fostered an emerging culture of oversharing and self-obsession. I remember at the time I started feeling this way, I didn’t expect to become such a grumpy old man in my early 30s.
Fortunately, the image of Curiosity drifting toward a completely alien and empty world, along with images of Ferdowsi and colleagues celebrating an achievement that was a decade in the making, was the perfect antidote to my creeping misanthropy.
The prospect of using emerging technologies to push our field of vision ever further into the universe, or into the nooks and crannies of unexplored worlds, seemed infinitely more exciting than the iPhone’s latest new feature.
The images that appeared by Curiosity in the months and years that followed revealed a world that was alien but also incongruously familiar. Mars is a dry, dead and dusty wasteland world, but it looks an awful lot like parts of the southwestern states, which I have called home for much of my adult life. The colorful landscapes sent back by the rover could easily fit into a photo album of any number of hikes I’ve taken in parts of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.
As Curiosity toured these unexplored but eerily recognizable places, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope expanded my mind and our understanding of the universe even further. with its regular discoveries of planets outside our solar system.
Requiem for Kepler? NASA’s Pioneering Planet Finder (Photos)
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For centuries, people could only talk about less than a dozen planets that we knew about. It wasn’t until the 1990s that astronomers spotted the first exoplanet. added Kepler thousands of new worlds in our current catalogwhich is surely missing billions yet to be discovered — even billions upon billions.
It’s hard to decide which smartphone app offers the perfect sunset selfie filter once you’ve started thinking what sunsets look like from other suns.
Without declaring a change at all, I started writing less about technology and more about science, especially planetary science and astronomy. And, of course, whatever Elon Musk and SpaceX and the other billionaire space brothers are up to. Say what you will about them, but it’s clear that both Musk and Jeff Bezos had similar insights that shifted some of their focus from technology to space. I get it and I want to see where it takes them and us.
Eight years after Curiosity survived its seven minutes of terror, it was followed by Perseverance rover, which carried a small helicopter called the Ingenuity. The February 2021 landing and Ingenuity flights in the following months were a welcome distraction from the second year of a severe pandemic.
If I’m being honest, COVID-19 has made me wonder if I’m focusing too much on space. Perhaps I’ve been a little careless, even decadent, in taking my eyes off so many problems on Earth to literally make a career out of just pondering the cosmos.
The jury’s still out on this one for me, but it’s now 10 years since I was first captivated by a robot named Curiosity and the world briefly fell in love with an engineer named Bobak wearing a punk haircut. I think of the decade he spent with countless other engineers and scientists working on those seven minutes of terror. This team solved the problem of how to carefully place a scientific laboratory on wheels on another planet that none of us have ever visited and will never visit. That’s insane level problem-solving acumen.
Curiosity inspired me to ponder the cosmos, but it inspired some more capable specimens of our species to pursue the cosmos. I suspect that tackling challenges that are literally alien in scope will actually make those more pressing challenges here at home a little less insurmountable.
So with a seriousness I feel for very few robots: Happy Anniversary, Curiosity, and Thank You.