We were driving along our county's colorful east side when I drove over some debris in the road a couple of years ago, and before long I realized we were taking some of the debris along with us.
We pulled over, looked under the car, and there was a branch wedged up under there, stuck under the fraddistand, near the automatic bungelater. Peggy was able to reach it, so we tossed it into the roadside where, I hope, a family of rabbits is using it as the roof of their new hutch.
You never know what you'll pick up on the road. Why, the Perseverance rover is up there on Mars, and somehow a rock found its way into the rover's left front wheel four months ago, and it's not about to leave! It likes the free ride.
This whole thing makes me think of Howard Wolowitz from the Big Bang, because NASA put a "left hazard avoidance camera" on this vehicle, and you know that's the sort of thing Howard always did on the show. That camera is sending back pictures of the big Mars rock for us to enjoy.
In the months the rock has been in the wheel, it has traveled 5.3 miles over the bumpy land on Mars as Perseverance explores an ancient lake and river delta that NASA brainiacs call Jezero Crater.
I don't know what your spring and summer plans are, but the Perseverance is busy drilling into the core of Mars to look at the sedimentary rocks around the delta. That makes our little garden projects seem sort of small in comparison, when you think those rocks up there were created billions and billions of years ago, when there used to be water on Mars. Martians stopped paying their water bills, and now look! Dry as a box of popcorn.
No comments:
Post a Comment