Something happened last week and it wasn’t the Texas snowpocalypse, which I thankfully got through without any big issues. A new rover was sent to and placed on the planet Mars and I just can’t get over how impressive the whole operation has been up to this point. The fact that human beings have the intellect and technological know-how to launch something into space with the precision for it to travel almost 300 million miles and only miss its landing target by 5 meters is just mind-blowing to me. Can you believe it!?

It just gives me hope for the future and that is definitely something we need right now. I’m not at all saying I think we should leave earth and figure out a way to live on Mars or some other planet. Maybe it’s the sci-fi fan in me or my daydreams about what or who exists out there beyond our solar system. Watching the landing live was very moving and exciting. What it must feel like for the people who have been working on this project for 10 years! The fruition of all that hard work and innovation, and it is just getting started. Now the rover will start exploring the ancient river basin where it now lives and will hopefully send back some amazing new information and images. It will also be taking samples of soil and rock to be retrieved at some point in the future.

Out of the 1000’s of free images that NASA has shared so far I chose some of my favorites and did some color correction since a lot of what they’ve posted is not processed and many have a very odd color cast. You can see in the above graphic what was planned and images below of how it actually looked. I was going to describe what happened but I think I will just encourage you to visit Nasa.gov and all of the great articles about the rover to learn more. The bottom line is I’m in awe and super excited.

Images Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech at https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/