David Kipping

There's some neat photos you can find online.

And they kind of look like lightsaber hilts.

So, yeah.

Yeah, to me, I think I tweeted something like, you know, this weapon is your life.

Like, don't lose it, Curiosity, because it's just dumping these little vials everywhere.

And yeah, it is scooping up these things.

And the intention is that in the future, there will be a sample return mission that will come and pick these up.

But the engineering behind those things is so impressive.

The thing that blows me away the most has been the landings.

I'm trained to be a pilot at the moment, so watching landings has become my pet hobby on YouTube at the moment, and how not to do it, how to do it with different levels of conditions and things.

But when you think about landing on Mars, just the light travel time effect means that there's no

possibility of a human controlling that descent.

And so you have to put all of your faith and your trust in the computer code or the AI or whatever it is that you've put on board that thing to make the correct descent.

And so there's this famous period called Seven Minutes of Hell.

where you're basically waiting for that light travel time to come back to know whether your vehicle successfully landed on the surface or not.

During that period, you know in your mind simultaneously that it is doing these multi-stages of deploying its parachute, deploying the crane,

activating its jets to come down and controlling its descent to the surface, and then the crane has to fly away so it doesn't accidentally hit the rover.

There's a series of multi-stage points where if any of them go wrong, the whole mission could go awry.

The fact that we are fairly consistently able to build these machines that can do this autonomously

is to me one of the most impressive acts of engineering that NASA have achieved.