Nasa JPL's rover named curiosity
Successfully landed on mars a few days ago
Appropriately, there's been a lot [of] focus on curiosity the rover but what I think makes jPL really great aren't it's robots
It's the people who build them
I can say this because I met a lot of them in the seven-year span I got to work on curiosity at JPL
That's nearly my entire professional career and a quarter of my life
I had a son and lost my mom to ALS while working on curiosity
I'm a different person now than when I started
as a result of this whole experience and all the people I've been able to associate with and while my
Contributions small relative to the overall picture. I tried to capture here exactly what it felt like to basically
have seven years of your life indicated with that beautiful phrase: " touchdown confirmed. we are safe on Mars"
So we're still two days from landing, but you see the news media has already started to
descend on JPL here
since we're all kind of nerds around here our office pools looks a little different than most
This is the landing ellipse for the Rover and we all kind of place guesses on where we think it's going to come down
So we're headed down to Nasa JPL to hang out with everyone and watch the landing
coming with my cute wife and my dad's gonna be there too
It's pretty exciting kind of sick to my stomach at the same time
Basically seven years of my life and career come down to about seven minutes
I'm kinda freaking out
I owe half my chomosomes to that guy right there is my dad
excellent chances. I'm not nervous
when Mark gets nervous he starts shivering like he's freezing
and right now it's about 85 degrees out here so
Mark is really nervous
i used to watch the apprentice and right before they hit with the board room
i'd have like eight blankets on me shivering something about the donald scared me (If I only knew what was coming 5 years later :/
We are in powered flight
skycrane has started
Touchdown confirmed. WE ARE SAFE ON MARS!!!
It was honestly a moving experience to see that picture come up that showed the shadow of the Rover
just dominating the Martian landscape
It's just a crazy thought
that something I've designed, I've touched, I've built, I've integrated
I've tested, is now
safely resting on another freaking planet
It's a crazy feeling