Monday afternoon I did approximately zero work between 1:40 and 3pm because I had a laptop propped on a filing cabinet streaming NASA TV and I was not about to look away. InSight landed on Mars yesterday, and I know approximately six people who actually sat and watched the thing happen live instead of just reading about it after the fact, and I'm a little smug about being one of them.
Quick context if you missed it: InSight is the lander that's supposed to stick a seismometer and a heat probe into the Martian surface to figure out what's going on inside the planet, structurally, the way you'd study earthquakes to understand the inside of the Earth. Cool science. But the science wasn't the part that had me white-knuckling a lukewarm coffee. It was the landing itself, the so-called "seven minutes of terror," where the spacecraft goes from about 12,300 miles an hour to a dead stop in under seven minutes, using a heat shield, then a supersonic parachute, then retrorockets, and it all has to happen completely on its own because a signal from Earth takes over eight minutes to arrive, so by the time mission control even knows the descent has started, the lander is already either fine or in a million pieces on the ground.
The detail I actually can't stop thinking about, though, isn't the physics. It's the peanuts. JPL has this tradition going back to 1964, after a string of early failed Ranger missions to the moon, where somebody brought a jar of peanuts into mission control and the next mission worked, and now they just do it every time, unshelled peanuts passed around the control room before every big landing or flyby, because apparently nobody wants to be the one who breaks a fifty-plus-year streak of good luck. I love that. Multi-hundred-million dollar spacecraft, some of the smartest engineers on the planet, and the actual operative technology is a bag of Planters.
The stream itself was rough going for a while. My office wifi decided the exact seven minutes that mattered were the seven minutes it wanted to buffer every eleven seconds, so I ended up tethering to my phone under my desk like I was hiding contraband. Somewhere around "atmospheric entry interface" the video froze on a shot of one guy in a headset with his hand over his mouth, and I sat there staring at his frozen face for what felt like actual minutes, no new audio, no new video, just him, mid-flinch. Not exactly the coverage NASA was going for but weirdly it added to the tension.
Then it landed, they confirmed the signal (relayed in real time by these two little briefcase-sized CubeSats called MarCO that had been tagging along the whole flight, which is its own small miracle nobody talks about enough), and the room just lost it. Grown adults hugging, somebody crying, the guy who'd been frozen mid-flinch on my screen finally unfroze and was suddenly cheering. A few minutes later they had a photo back already, dusty lens cover and all, and it was somehow more moving than I expected a slightly blurry rock to be.
I tried explaining the peanut thing to a coworker afterward and he just kind of nodded slowly and went back to his desk, which, fair. Not everyone needs to find fifty-year-old snack-based superstition charming. I do. I've decided I'm keeping a jar of peanuts near my own desk now for the next time I have to ship something I'm nervous about, which, given how my current project is going, might be as soon as next week. If it's good enough for a couple hundred million dollars of spacecraft engineering, it's good enough for whatever I'm about to push to production.
Also, separately, apparently yesterday was Cyber Monday and people spent something like $7.9 billion online in one day, which is a wild number to read right after watching a robot land on another planet, but that's 2018 for you, I guess. Two entirely different kinds of "humans doing something at scale" happening on the same Monday.