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NASA's Curiosity Rover Celebrates One Year On Mars
An anonymous reader writes "The Curiosity rover celebrates one year on Mars today. 'The 1-ton robot has achieved a great deal in its 12 months on Mars, discovering an ancient streambed and gathering enough evidence for mission scientists to declare that the planet could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. And more big finds could be in the offing, as Curiosity is now trekking toward its ultimate science destination: the foothills of a huge and mysterious mountain that preserves, in its many layers, a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions.'"
And your puny terrestrial years! Curiosity has some time (322 of your weak days, or a mere 313 of our superior Martian sols) before it reaches its first Martian birthday.
And, since it is now on Mars, that is clearly the birthday that counts.
In otherowrds, there's tons of better ways to spend all the billions injected into this project.
Yeah, we would probably be better off spending that $2.5 billion on another 8 or 9 days in Afghanistan (at the low, low price of just $300 million per day).
Haha, no, I'm only kidding. Only a complete idiot would think that $2.5 billion (which represents 0.06% of the US federal budget for FY 2013) to send an entire science laboratory to another planet is a waste of money. This country is full of money wasters, ground-breaking science missions are not part of those. Look at the defense budget if you want to talk about trimming the fat, not the science budget. The NSA in particular seems to have quite a lot of money that it doesn't need (or shouldn't be using).
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
No one can convince you that it was worth it. That really is the problem.