Opportunity lands on Mars!
As I write this, I'm watching a live feed from the Jet Propulsion Lab on National Geographic. Nat Geo has been carrying special programmes about the mars rovers all month and it's been a real treat to watch the rovers being designed, tested and launched. One memorable part was when a program manager asks an engineer if a particular module that needs to be tested using a heavy impact, should go for testing. The downside is that if the module gets damaged, there is no replacement module, and the whole rover program will go out of schedule. The engineer hems and haws since as all engineers know, one can never be completely sure if a device will perform the way it is designed to perform. Especially not when millions of dollars and your job is at stake. The program manager, in a typical managerial fashion, wants a binary yes-or-no answer. Finally the engineer okays the test and thankfully, the module survives the crash test. It is certainly instructive to find that even in NASA, no one is infalliable and even the best engineer can have doubts.
For those who have not been following news about the Rovers, Mars has a good reputation for being a graveyard for spacecrafts. Spacecrafts have been able to crash on the surface, but not land and survive for long. NASA sent two Rovers, the Spirit Rover and the Opportunity Rover to land on two sides of the planet. The British made Beagle was also sent to land on Mars, but it was never heard from again, and it is expected to have joined the graveyard like so many before it. The Spirit Rover landed successfully and has been transmitting amazing pictures using its 1MP digital camera (more about that later) but of late, it has had hiccups with an onboard computer rebooting and resetting itself over and over again. The JPL website reports that the scientists have found a way of getting the computer out of the rebooting cycle today.Opportunity Rover landed today (Sunday morning - I'm posting from India) but landing is just the beginning of a complex process which involves getting the robotic explorer out and functioning properly. I could go on and on about the amazing stuff that has been created for the Rovers, but I'll just let you visit the JPL website and find out on your own.

The camera on board the rovers is another work of art and I'll write more about that later. For now, explore the entire mission here.