In honor of the 2nd anniversary of the Curiosity rover reaching Mars, Caltech has put out a wonderful new video about the plucky little rover that has captured the hearts and imaginations of people around the world. And some familiar voices do the narration: astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson and actress Felicia Day. The video was created by Caltech planetary scientist Jeff Marlow, and he called it a “love letter” to the rover.
“As scientifically productive as the mission has been, Curiosity’s inspirational capacity may be its true value, its ability to make us feel as if we too are there, crunching on red dirt, pondering the planet’s past environments,” Marlow wrote on Wired.
Enjoy the look back at Curiosity’s travels so far. If you’re like me, the last line in the video (spoken by de Grasse Tyson) will really get you.
Find out more about the video at ourcuriosity.org, where they promise a “making of” video and more will be available soon.
too bad the background music was so loud I was sometimes having a hard time trying to understand what the narrator was saying
It seems silly to suggest that the urge to explore is shared universally. History and experience show that it is the few who actually feel an urge to explore, or at least one sufficiently strong to put down the remote and get off the couch. If it’s genetic, it must be a regressive gene. The rest of us benefit from their restlessness, of course. It’s like the quote from Shaw about how all progress depends upon unreasonable men.