Curiosity!
Aug. 5th, 2012 11:13 pmWe kept D. up late to watch tonight’s Mars landing. With the laptop on his own lap, and us leaning over his shoulders explaining what we could about what we were hearing, he got tense and excited along with the NASA/JPL team. Yay! Science. Yay for opportunities to get D. enthusiastic about cool, geeky stuff.
I like that I have my own family connection to Mars – my dad’s half-brother was a JPL engineer working on the early Mariner missions (or maybe it was Viking?). J’s dad also has a Mars connection; he helped create some technology for an experiment that was sent off in one of the more recent missions. Unfortunately, that one crashed. It was the one where JPL messed up on combining metric and English measurements. So through no merits of my own, I get to feel personally connected to another planet. It’s like a science/technology version of the Kevin Bacon game.
(Confession: My icon is really the moon. Nice disguise, huh?)
I like that I have my own family connection to Mars – my dad’s half-brother was a JPL engineer working on the early Mariner missions (or maybe it was Viking?). J’s dad also has a Mars connection; he helped create some technology for an experiment that was sent off in one of the more recent missions. Unfortunately, that one crashed. It was the one where JPL messed up on combining metric and English measurements. So through no merits of my own, I get to feel personally connected to another planet. It’s like a science/technology version of the Kevin Bacon game.
(Confession: My icon is really the moon. Nice disguise, huh?)