Image Credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA/AP
If you need a minute-long Monday morning pick-me-up, you can’t do much better than this video of NASA employees totally flipping out. They’ve got good reason to be excited: Early this morning, their rover Curiosity successfully touched down on Mars after a dramatic landing involving a supersonic parachute, a sky crane, and an incredibly cool space jetpack (I know, redundant). If Curiosity hadn’t stuck it like McKayla Maroney, a cash-strapped NASA would have been dealt a devastating blow. Instead, the agency is on track to potentially discover whether the Red Planet ever supported life.
So yeah, the video’s pretty awesome… especially compared to recent high-profile Hollywood failures set on our celestial neighbor. This clip might even be the first step toward fixing Mars’ reputation as box-office poison. Think about it: The Curiosity landing has “Future Ron Howard Movie” written all over it. Add in, say, Robert Downey Jr. as a brilliant but prickly engineer and Emma Stone as his tart-tongued protegee, and this could be bigger than Prometheus — not to mention several times more intelligible. Watch the video below — then take to the comments to discuss who you’d like to see in Curiosity: The Movie.
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