re: Happy Birthday, Mars Rover

At a party a couple of months ago I met a guy who plans what Curiosity will do each day (plus a couple of astronauts, most of the people there were NASA folks). He said that because transmissions take so long to get there (it can be as long as a 20 minute round trip) they have to tell it to go only a short distance at a time and then stop. That way they can tell if the rover is wandering into trouble.

He said once they overdid it and had a very scary moment. The return transmission came back and showed the rover was trying to climb over a boulder ... and it stopped when it got part way up the side. If it had continued on it probably would have flipped over and ended the mission.

I can only imagine a bunch of engineers watching it unfold on a monitor like a train wreck they can't stop.