@Cut4 Was taking ground balls at third during practice one day. Missed like 5 straight. Coach yelled, “Are you blind??” I said, “Yeah, I can’t see out of my right eye.” (true fact) Thus was born my nickname: One-Eye.
A $2.5 billion robot has been alone on another planet for 13 years and is still doing science. The scale of that sentence gets worse the longer you think about it.
Curiosity landed in August 2012. Obama was president. Instagram had 80 million users. The iPhone 5 hadn’t shipped yet. The rover was designed for a two-year mission and 20 kilometers of driving. It’s now driven 35.5 kilometers, climbed over 327 meters up the side of a mountain, drilled 46 holes into Martian rock, and is currently running its fifth mission extension.
The computer running all of this has 256 MB of RAM and a 200 MHz processor. Your AirPods have more computing power. Every command sent from Earth takes 14 minutes to arrive. Every photo sent back takes the same 14 minutes. When Curiosity drills into a rock, the team in Pasadena won’t know if it worked for half an hour. They’ve been operating on that delay, every single day, for 4,846 Martian sols.
The power source is 10.6 pounds of plutonium-238 generating about 110 watts. Less than a ceiling fan. It will keep producing electricity for decades because the half-life of Pu-238 is 87.7 years. The rover will run out of moving parts before it runs out of power.
And those wheels. Machined from single blocks of aluminum, 0.75 millimeters thick. Half a dime. JPL watched them get shredded by Martian rock starting in 2013, rerouted the entire mission path, taught the rover to drive backwards, and kept going. The wheels look like they lost a fight with a can opener. The rover is still climbing a mountain.
Every iPhone you’ve owned since 2012 is in a landfill. Curiosity is on Mars, 140 million miles from the nearest repair shop, running on a ceiling fan’s worth of nuclear power, sending data through a 14-minute time delay, on shredded wheels, doing geology that rewrites what we know about whether life ever existed somewhere other than Earth.
We built that. With 0.01% of the federal budget.
🥇It was an honor to compete for my country on the world stage.🇺🇸 I traveled to Cortina with a focus on competing my best and representing the U.S. with integrity. Sport has a beautiful way of uniting people & these Olympics did just that! Thx for the support and love…
We’re officially heading into Olympic week! 🇮🇹🤩 With the Milano Cortina 2026 Opening Ceremony officially kicking off the highlight event of the year on Friday, it’s time to reveal the competition program for Women and Men. 🗓️
Are you ready? 🥹
#fisalpine#ilovesnow #passionbeyondlimits #milanocortina2026
when we posted a video of us writing the afterthought chorus in 2022 we had no idea the journey this song was going to take us on. Hopefully we did it justice. Thank you for your persistence on wanting this song. What a ride. ‘Afterthought’ is all yours.
RIP Charlie Kirk. It doesn’t matter what your opinion is of Charlie or his politics if you don’t view this as one of the darkest days in American history than you are part of the problem.
🚨 #BREAKING: The Patriot who lost his life at the Trump rally has been identified as Corey Comperatore, the former fire chief of Buffalo Township
According to his family, Corey’s final act was heroically shielding his young daughter from the gunfire.
Rest in peace, Corey 🙏🏻