PERSEVERANCE

Yes, yes I know… I have no idea…

As to why I have been writing the past three posts with their titles in CAPITAL letters.

To put more emphasis on it, I suppose. Eh, there’s probably no reason.

Anyway, for the past few weeks, I have been getting addicted to learning stuff about space.

SPACE

And few days back, on February 16^th, I read about a NASA’s rover to Mars, and I can’t tell you HOW EXCITED I WAS.

Perseverance had been launched from earth in July 2020, and after a seven-month journey, it landed on Mars on February 19^th, 2:25 a.m. IST. I simply COULDN’T miss the opportunity to watch it live on NASA’s YouTube channel, and so I set an alarm for two in the morning.

And here’s what happened –

• At around two in the morning, my mother woke me up. Correction – she TRIED to wake me up. And I didn’t even RESPOND to her.
• Five minutes later, she TRIED waking me up again. No response from me.
• Two minutes after that, she got so annoyed with me that she ALMOST screamed, and then I woke up. I immediately switched on the computer, logged in to YouTube, went to NASA’s channel and watched the rover landing along with two million others.

I simply can’t express how FANTASTICALLY EXCITING it was.

They showed the rover above the Martian atmosphere, through Mars satellites, I believe, and the ‘Seven minutes of terror’ were so fun to watch.

The ‘Seven minutes of terror’ were seven minutes when the landing of the rover on Mars was watched in anticipation by everyone. It is, apparently, pretty difficult to land on a planet, and many of the rovers sent to Mars have failed in landing. There was also a helicopter – Ingenuity, which helped in the landing of the rover.

But what excites me MORE, is the fact that Perseverance has landed in the 45 km wide Jezero Crater.

And THERE, (I COULDN’T STOP MYSELF FROM JUMPING WHEN I HEARD ABOUT THIS) it’s going to search for fossils of ancient microbial life! Imagine if there was once a time, before any of us existed, when Mars was a hospitable planet, microbial life used to live there! If the rover does find something, it will be such an EXTRAODINARY discovery in astronomy!!!

I LOVE SPACE.

Anyway, there’s also some news that SpaceX might send humans to Mars in 2024/2025, and these are some links for you to look into if your interested in this kind of stuff. –

Your kids might live on Mars. Here’s how they’ll survive | Stephen Petranek
From TED.

What will SpaceX do when they get to Mars?
From Primal Space.

I also just realized that the title makes this seem like some inspirational post about how you have to persevere… but WHO CARES -I’m not going to change it.

BY THE WAY, there was also a rumor that MARK ROBER was in the NASA live stream, but I never saw him in the chat. Of course, I could’ve just missed him…

K BAI.

*None of the videos above are mine, they have been taken from YouTube, name of the channels have been mentioned.