06:30:13

Hopefully, this morning at thirteen seconds after six thirty a.m., the rover “Curiosity” will safely land on Mars and a new phase of space exploration can begin. I’ve got to admit that I was rather out of the loop when it comes to matters about this particular extra-terrestrial exploration mission until I happened to hear a short item about it on the “Today” programme as I was driving to work last week, but, as I do with a lot of things, I suddenly got terrifically excited at the prospect.

After all, when someone is describing to you the idea of landing something the size of a small car on a completely different planet, somehow that stirs in me some kind of sense of pride in what humanity is capable of that has long been dormant.

Cars on Mars…!

What a brilliant thought.

I mean I don’t want humanity to inflict its carbon emissions on another planet or anything like that, nor do I wish them to suffer the strange and appalling experience of congestion but…

Cars on Mars!!!

It’s bloody brilliant…!

It’s like all of those hopes and dreams that we used to ponder upon during my childhood are finally coming true.

That is, of course, if it manages to survive the “six minutes of hell” prior to the landing which are completely crucial and will no doubt leave a strange sense of uncertainty amongst the team controlling the mission and lead to scenes of either complete joy or complete despair shortly afterwards, depending upon how that landing turns out.

After all, it’s bad enough trying to land any kind of flying machine when you’re actually inside the thing, and you’ve got immediate control over what you’re doing, but when you’re trying to make a landing on a planet that’s on average 225 million miles away, the chances are that by the time that you know that you’re supposed to relax, the simple delays caused by the laws of physics mean that whatever you think is happening will already have happened.

This is why that landing time is so unusual. Those thirteen seconds are all down to some precise and very complicated mathematics which date back to far before even the November 2011 launch date. Hopefully the four-part descent system, which includes aerobraking, parachutes, retro rockets and a unique “skycrane” system, will slow everything down just enough for a perfect landing and will drop the rover on schedule precisely where it is supposed to be, so that this exciting new phase of scientific discovery can begin.

Either that or yet another mission to Mars will end up crashing down to another uncertain fate and Mars will continue to keep so many of its secrets.

Now there is the remotest of possibilities that some kind of Martian equivalent of Orson Welles might just be broadcasting to his fellow Martians about a strange object landing from another planet on that very morning and, unfortunately for him, as life does sometimes imitate art, we might just be about to have “the morning that panicked Mars” but I very much doubt it, and so I think that it is unlikely that we are about to trigger our own “War of the Worlds” in reverse…

But of course you just never know and our fascination with the red planet looks likely to continue for some considerable time to come.

And aren’t human beings sometimes the most wonderful things…?