Curiosity madness has probably crested by now, but no harm in basking in the afterglow. This just-released image, after all, is by far the best yet to emerge from the entire Mars landing event (here’s a full-sized image in and poke around).That tiny orb is the #Curiosity, plummeting towards the Mars surface.Alexis Madrigal is captivated:What’s fascinating is that it’s our technology that looks alien, not the empty world to which we’ve sent it.
Here’s the image’s context: as the Rover descended to Earth, it jettisoned its heat shield, which fell to the Martian surface. As it went, the Rover took images with the Mars Descent Imager, known as MARDI. A few of these photographs have been released by NASA, but the bandwidth to Mars is rather limited, so we hadn’t seen a single full-resolution frame from that camera. Until now.He makes an interesting point. I’d add that the image looks “alien” precisely because it aligns so spectacularly with our popular conceptions of exotic spacecraft. What’s more conventionally “alien” than a silvery spherical craft descending on a planet?It’s real-life science fiction, and part of the reason the Curiosity inspires the awe it does is partly because we’ve once again caught up with our collective imagination of what otherworldly adventuring is supposed to look like.