LET.LOVE.LIVE

On a mission to Mars a million miles a minute…

If you want to go to JPL be warned that for some reason nerd operations ignite at the inception of light on the crest of the horizon. Total torture… mostly because I hadn’t had the human required minimum amount of sleep. The tour consisted of several stops in machine rooms where you really didn’t know exactly what was going on. One of the engineers turned on their pressurized vacuum to show us how it worked but damned if you have to be inside the thing to really experience it, needless to say it made a compressor sound. That is all. Up at mission control we were able to sit like a government officials and oversee all the chatter in the room where they control the satellites and information coming in from current missions. Mission control… where we watched videos you can watch on The Discovery Channel, sorry JPL, so fucking boring. I did some sleeping but uncomfortably because the distance between the arm rest and my sleeping head was further than my midget arms could reach so I ended up slouching down and looking like maybe I had some sort of neck-spinal injury from a incredible stair accident… then afterwards I felt like I did. Tours are only held on Fridays so they can hide all the interesting shit. Apparently. 

Advise to those who do not wish to die of boredom… if you’re going to JPL do it before they send their rovers on a mission to mars because there was nothing inside any of the incredibly vast and sterile rooms we viewed from safe distances, separated by glass. We can’t let filthy assholes like you actually into the room because nothing is happening in there and it’s empty? Genius. Just when I thought “Wow, another empty room with sand…” an unassuming man walked around the corner and stood in front of me making intermittent eye contact. Systems Engineer and Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover, Bill Nelson, head of the team organized to be responsible for the day-to-day activities of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. He was eager to let me know that the room wasn’t totally empty. Deep in the corner they had a replica of the mars rover Curiosity. He began telling stories about the problems they faced once the rovers reached Mars and what they did to overcome those challenges. How they came up with ways to displace weight to compensate for the 40% decrease in gravity on Mars because besides the dust covering solar panels preventing it from acquiring energy the second biggest problem were the rovers getting stuck. How do you get an object that is stuck in the sand, out of it, without actually being in there… the answer, reverse. Seems simple enough, but when you are dealing with equipment that literally costs millions of dollars, getting it “more” stuck in the sand is really not the best option. So multitudes of tests were done and yes reverse is the best option when stuck in the sand on Mars. Good to know. By far the most interesting information that he shared were the mineral deposits the rovers collected pointing towards a past presence of water on Mars and how most of this telling information was accidentally “uncovered.” One of the rovers wheels had broken and was being dragged behind, as it made is way around to inspect the alien terrain. The scientists noticed that inside the trench dug by the inoperable wheel was exposed material of a different nature. The rovers collected samples and confirmed that the minerals included calcium sulfate and gypsum. He explains that gypsum is formed by calcium sulfate in the presence of water and that it is proof that Mars once was most probably a very wet environment much like Earth.

Other signs also point towards Mars having hosted large amounts of water in the past, large rippled marks and erosion distinct to the flow of water ruling out wind resurfacing.  So, what’s the significance… there used to be water on Mars… who gives a shit? Well it’s insight into what happens when the atmosphere is depleted, it provides us with clues to how our terrestrial planet might react to unstable changes in atmosphere. Also water must be present for life to be present, or at least that’s what we think is true. The presence of water on Mars lets us know that there could have been life on Mars at one point. Total highlight of the tour.

There were too many galleries of photographs to even categorize. Incredible images captured from the vast emptiness in space of planets and moons you can’t even begin to wrap your head around. Images that look like artistic renderings that were taken by satellites sent to orbit sweet spots in our solar system. It’s photographs like these that make it impossible not to get some perspective here. “What the fuck am I doing with my life… I’m on a spinning rock hurling away from other spinning rocks and blobs of gaseous materials that crowd together and push the universe around.” It’s when I care least about bullshit ideology and the concepts that assholes try to push on you so you can fit in. Hey asshole, sit on it and spin, yeah no, I’m talking about Earth. Have a nice ride.