There’s another Mars article in the Times this morning, which I wouldn’t bother to note in a full post save for one thing: the way they got the results.
The right front wheel of Spirit stopped turning in March 2006. Since then, the rover has been driving backwards, dragging the lame wheel along. This May, scientists noticed a bright spot in the trail of overturned dirt.
They turned Spirit around for a closer look, finding high levels of silica, the main ingredient of window glass. They then aimed the rover at a nearby rock, wanting to break it apart to determine if the silica was just a surface coating, or if the rock was silica all the way through.
The target rock survived Spirit’s charge, but a neighboring rock cracked open. The interior of that rock, which the scientists informally named “Innocent Bystander,” turned out to be rich in silica.
NASA gets a lot of bad press when probes go missing or malfunction, some of which is justified. They don’t get enough credit, though, for their ability to work around problems, which is nothing short of astounding.
I mean, think about what happened here: the Mars rover broke down over a year ago, and they found a way to keep it functioning in spite of one bad wheel. Then, they made an interesting discovery precisely because of that malfunction, and their clever work-around.
That’s impressive even without mentioning the fact that the rover was supposed to stop working entirely a few years ago.
If you listen to popular discussions of NASA, you’d think the place was being run by monkeys, and that’s not even from the private-space-program nuts. People harp on their mistakes all the time, without any real understanding of how difficult the things they’re trying to do are, and how impressive it is that they manage to get anything done at all.
I mean, look at it this way: if somebody asked you to figure out what some rock was made of, you could probably do it relatively easily (assuming you know something about rocks). You just walk over, pick it up, maybe hit it with a hammer or do some chemical analysis.
If they asked you to figure out what a rock was made of from the next room, by looking through a window, that starts to become a hard problem. You can probably bounce a laser off it, and do some spectroscopy, but it’s a little tricky.
What NASA’s doing is trying to figure out what rocks are made of from 100 million miles away. And they’re doing an amazing job of it.
So let’s hear it for the ingenuity of rocket scientists.