Photo credit: myscienceacademy

Earlier today, I posted on Facebook that I was more entertained by NASA scientists reacting to Curiosity’s landing on Mars than I was by any Olympian winning their event.

Photo credit: NY Times.

The below video about how it landed was made and posted before the attempt, by the way, so that suspenseful music and “it’s crazy” talk from actual scientists is real. The landing of Curiosity involved a space launch, a parachute, propulsion rockets, and a motherfucking skycrane, and this is all just to get the rover away from Earth and not smash it to tiny bits on the surface of Mars.

If you’re not into science (and if that’s true, then why are you even here?) and maybe don’t feel like watching the video, consider that NBC has a longer delay in broadcasting the London Olympics than does Curiosity relaying its images, and that your iPhone is a more powerful computer than this awesome piece of space machinery that traveled over 300 million miles to get to where it is now. Successfully landing Curiosity on Mars is like hitting a golf ball from Los Angeles and sinking a hole in one in Scotland. No, really, those are the odds NASA was up against when it put a car on another world. Yeah. It put a car in a crater on another planet that is 155,000,000 miles away and allow it to communicate with us. For two years.

Can you even?

Among other remarkable things that happened today: I got a free loaf of bread at the grocery store with the purchase of a jar of peanut butter, which I needed, anyway.