So Curiosity finally drove somewhere. Not far — about 15 feet forward, a 120-degree turn, then another 8 feet backward, which NASA is calling a "13-point turn" if we're being generous with the point count on a six-wheeled robot with no reverse camera worries. But it happened yesterday, August 22nd, and I had JPL's raw image page open in a tab basically all day like some kind of degenerate.
I wrote about the landing here back on the 6th, when half the internet was refreshing Twitter for @MarsCuriosity updates and the "seven minutes of terror" video was making the rounds at every office I know of, including mine. Since then it's been two weeks of instrument checkouts, camera calibrations, and NASA very deliberately not rushing anything, which is the correct call when your rover cost 2.5 billion dollars and there's no tow truck on Mars. But watching a $2.5 billion nuclear-powered dune buggy sit still for sixteen days tests even my patience, and I have a lot of patience for this stuff. I've been into space junk since I was a kid watching shuttle launches on a TV wheeled into the classroom, so this is not a casual interest.
The actual drive itself is almost funny in how small it is. Fifteen feet. My driveway is longer than that. But the significance isn't the distance, it's that Curiosity did the whole thing on its own wheels, under its own power, and the front and rear hazard-avoidance cameras caught the tracks afterward — four sets of tread marks pressed into that reddish-brown dirt, looking weirdly similar to tire tracks you'd see in wet sand at the beach. JPL posted the Hazcam shots within hours and I probably looked at that image longer than I've looked at any photo all year. There's something about seeing actual physical marks left by a machine we built, on a planet nobody's ever walked on, that photos of the landing itself didn't quite give me. The landing was drama. This was just proof it works.
A quick complaint, unrelated but not really: while I'm on the topic of things moving slower than they should, my cable modem has been dropping connection every few hours for about a week now and Comcast's phone tree still, in the year of our lord 2012, cannot figure out that "my modem shows the send light blinking amber" is a real diagnostic sentence and not something to route me to billing. I've power-cycled the thing four times today. Somewhere a rover 150-some million miles away managed to drive itself across an alien surface without human intervention and my internet in the suburbs can't stay up through a Tuesday afternoon. Perspective is a strange thing.
Anyway. Back to Mars. The mission team's plan from here is to keep doing short test drives over the next several days before Curiosity heads toward a spot they're calling Glenelg, a few hundred meters from the landing site where three different types of terrain apparently meet, which is exactly the kind of geological Venn diagram a rover with a laser and a drill wants to be parked next to. Full science operations aren't expected to properly ramp up until later in the fall; the rover's still in what NASA is calling its commissioning phase, basically the robot equivalent of a new employee's first two weeks, minus the awkward HR paperwork.
What I keep coming back to is the lag. Every command has to account for something like a 13-to-14 minute one-way signal delay right now, depending on where Mars and Earth are in their orbits, which means nobody is joysticking this thing in real time. Engineers write out a whole sequence, send it up, and then just wait to see what happened, hours later, through a trickle of images beamed back via one of the orbiters overhead. It's the opposite of the instant-feedback loop everything else in tech has trained us to expect. You'd think that would make it boring. It doesn't. If anything the wait is part of why I keep checking the page.
I'll probably do another post once they release the first proper science results, whenever those show up. For now I'm just going to keep an eye on the raw image feed and hope Comcast gets its act together before Curiosity does anything more interesting than a three-point turn.