On 26 January, 2009, NASA announced that despite several weeks of effort, the Mars Rover Spirit had become stuck in the soft Martian sand and would not move again. The press release came shortly after the sixth anniversary of Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, making it to Mars a few weeks apart in January of 2004. Given the remote location of Spirit, NASA could not give it the Old Yeller treatment and instead “decided” to reclassify it as a stationary science platform.
Spirit and Opportunity were supposed to have mission lives of ninety days. They exceeded expectations and are still active after more than twenty two hundred days.
But what in the name of The Celestial Teapot does a tandem of robots need to do to get a little love in the mainstream media? It should be appreciated by even the most oblivious, mushy-headed observer that the scientific spiffiness of the rovers knocks the guts right out of their competition for space on Page 1. Sadly, we become bored with amazing things twelve minutes after we hear about them.
These two objects are fired one hundred and eighty million miles through space and play super-sonic bocce ball. One giant ball moving thirty five times faster than a rifle round fires two teeny marbles to another giant ball moving twenty eight times faster than a rifle round, and then the marbles have to park. That’s a tough gig when you consider how many people can’t negotiate the parking lot at the Piggly Wiggly without initiating a bodily injury lawsuit and a phone call to Pep Boys.
Since landing, the rovers have trundled for miles about the Martian surface like… well, like no other damn thing in human history. The rovers have drilled holes, taken samples, performed experiments, been attacked by aliens, and returned reams of information giving us the closest thing to the experience being there that we could reasonably hope for. It is no exaggeration to say that the rovers may have produced more new information about Mars than any other source. They have rediscovered the Red Planet.
The fact that the mission still going on after five years is a singular achievement and should make you scream at your monitor right now in utter amazement. Imagine you’ve won the Publishers’ Whoever-They-Are Sweepstakes and the giant check was delivered to your home by Ed McMahon despite the fact that he has been dead since June. Scream like that.
Take a moment, the Internet can wait.
The complexity of this event and its accomplishments are such that to state them just as they are can miss the forest for the trees. Some perspective: In an average episode of Iron Chef: America, Mario Batali needs to prepare a full course meal for three judges in precisely one hour. If you up the difficulty level from “Pudgy Ginger Dude’ to “Mars Rover,” Batali would need to churn out 122 dishes in a kitchen the size of an NFL football field and deliver them via Predator UAV to 73 separate judges each hidden in the hold of their own stealthed-out Sikorsky helicopters traveling across the entire globe in random directions.
Allez cuisine and best of luck, pasta-boy!
The rovers were leaning in to it too. Spirit had a little doohickey on it for drilling into rocks, and used it so much that it wore the doohikey to a nub. So disadvantaged, the Rover can now only scratch at the dirt, becoming the first Dickensian character on another planet.
When this anniversary came and went the MSM coverage was predictably anemic. The distilled awesomeness of the endeavor was met by a generous round of indifference. The twin automata getting headlines that week were named Jay and Conan.
But even if it wasn’t covered in any depth and the public seemed indifferent, remember that these are the real things that scientific and critical minds can accomplish. Remember that these things last, and will be remembered long after those two other automata are footnotes, or less.