That call at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed the rover and robotic laboratory Curiosity landed safely on Mars late Sunday night Pacific Time. An anxious crowd of controllers, engineers and scientists at the JPL control room erupted into cheers, applause, hugs and a collective sigh of relief that Curiosity survived the feared “seven minutes of more »
My posts on this site have stressed that good science fiction is not about machines and high tech. It’s about people. But what about science news? The big news right now out of NASA is about this weekend‘s landing of NASA’s Martian Science Laboratory, a car-sized, nuclear-powered rover called Curiosity. When it attempts to more »
July 4 was one of those exceptional, watershed days for physicists. Years from now, a group of lucky physicists will still smugly tell colleagues and awe-inspired students, “I was there when they announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle.” The rest of us will likely go, “Huh?” You have to understand, this is a more »