Hopefully one of our planetary-science types will soon be strong-armed persuaded to write a blog post telling us about their perspective on the Mars Science Laboratory mission. In the mean time, here is what I learned from the landing event. All of these were things that I really should have known already, but now I’ve really got them.
10. London, Ontario has no shortage of people willing to sit in a stuffy room with strangers in the middle of the night to watch an Internet feed (see Figure 1). And no shortage of fantastic amateur astronomers who will operate telescopes and show people stars and planets while they wait for the middle of the night.
9. The RASC London Centre‘s Bob Duff will valiantly attempt to count all of these people (see Figure 2). He thinks there were about 70 people in addition to the somewhat-expected Western and RASC types (see Figure 3).
8. When you get people together in the middle of the night, they drink quite a bit of coffee. It’s a good idea to bring extra cups.
7. When you forget to bring extra cups, we have great grad students who are willing to go on a mission to find the nearest grocery store open at midnight on a holiday. Thanks Tony!
6. When you bring people together to watch an Internet feed (thanks Neil and Mat for running cables down hallways and through windows), it’s a good idea to find out if your computer has the right software to actually show the live stream.
5. When you forget to do #6, we have great grad students who bring their own laptops and are happy for them to be pressed into service. Thanks Emily!
4. When organizing a public event, it’s possible to spend too much time worrying about which nerdy T-shirt to wear (see Figure 4).
3. Some things are worth staying up past one’s bedtime for. (See Figure 5. As an astronomer I should really have had a better appreciation for this one!)
2. Being on camera forced me to make up my mind about whether I thought the landing would actually be a success. (There may be implications here for teaching and/or politics.) If the interview actually made the Weather Network (!) you’ll see that I did in fact say that it would work.
1. Science WORKS. It’s not just a bunch of tedious, meaningless symbol manipulation, regardless of what students think as they grind through their problem sets. Those folks in the blue shirts, and plenty of their colleagues who were not on camera, made it through those problem sets, and they figured out how to land a nuclear-powered laser car on another planet. Pretty awesome.
Tweet