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…?
