Curious

I’ve grown fond of Curiosity, the Mars Rover.

I know Curiosity is the size of an SUV and weighs about 1,900 pounds.

But somehow it seems like a friendly and brave household appliance, tooling around Mars’ dusty surface, 33 million or 157 million miles from home.

I started rooting for it in early August when the NASA folks talked about the “seven minutes of terror,” those moments when the rover would either make it through the top of the Martian atmosphere (at a brisk 13,000 mph) and land well or it wouldn’t . All that work, all of those years thinking and planning and sketching and designing and redesigning and pushing on by all those scientists and engineers hinged on seven minutes.  

I also thought of some of the appliances I know well, the washer that does a kind of samba through part of most wash cycles, the computer that sometimes decided to take whole afternoons to boot up. I didn’t have much faith. How could this work?

Yet it did. Within minutes on the ground, Curiosity was snapping pictures and letting us see.

Today, it was testing out its bionic arm. Soon it will scoop up soil samples. Eventually it will drill through rocks and analyze them.  

It will roam on.

So, I check in now and then on NASA’s website to see what Curiosity is up to.    

I like how its “eyes” seem to blink back at us like a sweet Labrador Retriever and how it makes me look skyward often.

I find myself seeking info on Mars. (I didn’t recall from my school days that Mars can be 35 million or a couple hundred million miles away depending on our rotations around the sun. I didn’t know a Mars day is called a sol – such a pretty name -  or that each morning Mission Control “wakes” the little guy to a song just like it used to do for the space crews. One morning, it was Louis Armstrong’s “When You Wish Upon a Star,” another sol it was Florence and the Machine’s “Cosmic Love.”)

I like what it reminds me, of what comes from collaboration, from deliberate mathematical and scientific thinking and from outsized creative imagining.

It reminds me to be curious.