Curiosity...and it's impending historic announcement

I'm a HUGE fan of Curiosity.  It's delivery to Mars I found to be simply mind boggling.  In fact, when I first sat through a presentation on the planned landing system probably 6 or 7 years ago I thought "Are you kidding me, how the hell are they going to make that work?  There is zero room for error!".  Well, somehow they did and Curiosity has been lasering the crap out of Mars ever since.

You could actually say that that mission was what convinced me to start this blog, along with a little push from one of our contributors.  (The initial inspiration came from the Sarcastic Rover twitter feed, which is still going strong.)

The MSL science team recently made an announcement regarding a potentially "historic" find and in the last few days NASA has publicly "backtracked" saying that the announcement is not exactly earth-shattering.  The first article I read on this was on the Atlantic Wire, and frankly I found the article to be a piece of journalistic crap.  They pretty much just said NASA must be covering up something or doesn't really know what they're doing if they've had to change their take on the significance of the find.  The comments from the readers were even worse (not that the comments section of any news article is ever anything more than the area under the bridge where the trolls live).  I can't find that version of the article and oddly I have yet to see the retraction printed in any of the major news outlets or in NASA's news section on it's website but here's a link to another article on it.

Here's my take on the situation.  Every damned thing about this mission has been historic.  We've done sampling not previously possible so it should be no surprise that whatever we're finding is new to us, or at least is a verification of something we've only suspected.  The significance of any scientific finding as always going to be relative.  To an exo-planetary geochemist what is earth shattering might seem boring as shit to most people, simply because they don't really give a crap about soil chemistry.  The public is hoping we find stuff they can understand.  That doesn't mean we need to retract the importance of any particular data though.  Okay, maybe the guy got a little overzealous, but hey he's getting science data from a fucking atomic robot on another planet, how can he not get excited?!  This discovery might not make your day, but it will certainly make his.

Keep Calm and Do A Science!!