So I've had three different browser tabs open all week with pictures of a tiny white speck sitting in a scoop of Martian dirt, and I keep coming back to them like it's going to do something. It's not going to do something. That's kind of the whole point of this post.
Quick catch-up if you haven't been following: Curiosity has been parked at a sandy patch called Rocknest for the last couple weeks, doing its first real soil scooping and sample work since it landed back in August. Sometime in the last few days the rover's cameras caught a small bright object sitting right in one of the scoop holes, and for about a day the space-nerd corners of the internet lost their minds a little. Was it a mineral vein? Some weird ice crystal? A hundred blog headlines with question marks that all basically translated to "ALIENS?" even though none of them actually said that word.
Turns out it's almost certainly a fleck of plastic that came off the rover itself. JPL's working theory, and it's a pretty convincing one, is that it's debris shed from Curiosity during the scooping process, not anything native to Mars at all. Which, look, I get why that's a letdown for the "unexplained space mystery" crowd, but I actually think this is the more interesting story anyway.
Why the boring answer is the good answer
We put a nuclear-powered robot the size of a Mini Cooper on another planet using a sky crane that lowered it on cables like something out of a Michael Bay storyboard, and it's precise enough that when a millimeter-sized piece of its own hardware falls off, the science team notices within a sol or two and can reason out where it probably came from. That's the actual headline. Not "mystery space object," just, we built a thing so good at watching itself that it caught its own lint.
I'll admit I'm a sucker for this mission in a way I wasn't for the previous rovers, and I think it's partly the format of how NASA's been sharing it. The raw images dump straight onto the JPL site with barely any lag, no press release needed to see them, and half the fun the last two months has been random people on forums finding stuff in the raw feed before anyone official comments on it. That's basically what happened here too — someone spotted the shiny bit in a low-res thumbnail before there was any official write-up explaining it.
Small aside, not really related except in the sense that it also showed up in my inbox this week: Apple sent out press invitations today for an event on October 23rd. The tagline on the invite is something like "we've got a little more to show you," which is doing a lot of unsubtle work if you've been paying attention to the rumor mill about a smaller iPad. I'm not going to spend the rest of this post speculating about screen sizes and price points, mostly because every other tech site on the internet is going to do that exact thing for the next two weeks and I don't need to add to the pile. I'll just say I'm skeptical a 7-inch iPad makes sense next to a Nexus 7 that's already $130 cheaper, but Apple's made me eat those words before.
Anyway. Back to Mars, sort of. The thing that actually annoys me about the shiny-object coverage isn't that people got excited, it's how fast some of the writeups walked it back into "definitely just debris, nothing to see here" once the boring explanation showed up, like the earlier excitement had been embarrassing. It wasn't embarrassing. Noticing a weird thing and asking what it is is the entire job description of a scientist, and honestly of anyone paying attention. The rover's going to scoop a few more times at Rocknest before it moves on toward Glenelg, so there'll probably be a couple more of these little "wait, what's that" moments before the month's out, and I hope people keep getting excited about them instead of pre-emptively being embarrassed on Twitter's behalf.
I've got the raw image feed bookmarked next to my RSS reader now, which is not a sentence I expected to type about a Mars mission when I started this blog last November, but here we are.