A heads up for all of you, especially the space geeks (though if you are a Sheldonesque space nerd this is likely not news to you) that the Mars Rover Curiosity will land on the red planet tonight (or tomorrow morning depending on your time zone).
The landing is currently scheduled to take place around 10:30 pm tonight (Pacific Time) or 1:30 am tomorrow morning (East coast time). Of course the landing will actually take place about 15 minutes before we hear about it due to the delay in radio signals from Mars to Earth.
For the past week or so many of us have marveled at the accomplishments of our athletes here on Earth, and certainly they deserve the applause. But we should not ignore the accomplishments of our scientists either.
Consider that they have taken a piece of man made technology, sent it on a journey of millions of miles and will be landing it on another planet. Indeed they did not just launch the object to where Mars was, but to where it would be many months later. Imagine what it would be like if the next time you drove on your vacation you had to plan for the fact that your destination was moving…
As President Kennedy said, we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard.
I’m quite sure he’d be watching, will you ?