If there was ever life on Mars, the NASA Perseverance mission has a good chance of discovering its remnants. They landed the robot on Thursday, and soon the search will begin. They’ve chosen an ancient river delta in the middle of a crater, and that seems like a logical place to look.
It takes 11 minutes to send a message to or from Mars at the speed of light, which helps explain why the robot left Earth in July and only arrived in mid-February. At the moment, the red planet is 204,622,778 kilometers from Earth, or 127,146,700 miles. It’s traveling around the sun at 53,853 miles per hour. The target landing site is 4.8 miles x 4.1 miles wide, but covered with rocks, 200-foot cliffs, and sand dunes. Because of the distance from Earth, the robot had to serve as its own pilot and navigator to avoid a bad landing that would ruin the mission. It entered the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour and used a heat shield, a parachute, reverse rocket boosters, and something called an air crane to settle softly on the surface. It also brought a helicopter that can fly itself in the thin, highly radioactive air of Mars where temperatures are frequently 100 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
Scientists accomplished this and it has so far gone off without a glitch. But what everyone is talking about today is why Texas has no electricity and why one of Texas’s senators went to Cancun with his family while his constituents were freezing to death.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Our society is collapsing before our eyes, at a slow-enough rate that it’s hard to see and describe accurately.
That’s the short answer.
I’m glad the media is covering his royal asswipe.
The paradox between the amazing technological feats we are actually able to accomplish and the fact that we have an energy system in our second largest state that collapses when it gets unexpectedly cold for a couple of weeks, tells us quite a lot. The Texas electrical grid was designed with the basic premise that it would poke a thumb in the eye of libs and demonstrate the superiority of that mythical American exceptionalism, couched in Texas style rugged individualism. Republican politics is the cancer that is killing us. And they are not going to stop trying, even when it kills people.