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Mission to Mars

August 7, 2012 by Anna Moull in Featured, The Vulture with 0 Comments

Yesterday, NASA successfully landed the largest exploratory robot on the surface of Mars. Curiosity has been hailed the most ambitious mission to the red planet ever attempted. The primary aim of this mission is to find traces of past life, to determine if life ever existed on Mars. Mars is littered with great mountains and canals, which gives rise to the hypothesis that water once flowed freely across this now baron wasteland. The existence of said water greatly increases the probability that life (in one form or another) existed elsewhere in our solar system, and that is what the Curiosity Rover hopes to discover.

Here at Vulture, we consider ourselves rather curious. We are curious about all sorts of things. Music, science, stiffies, art and believe it or not, government conspiracies. Yes, you heard us correctly, government conspiracies. Allow us to elaborate…

The Curiosity mission cost the US government $2.6 billion. Billion!! Money well spent, clearly, but the risk factors were huge! The Curiosity Rover descended onto the planet’s surface via a sky crane, which was carried on a rocket. In order to deploy the crane, this rocket, which was travelling at a whopping 21,240km/h, had to slow to a virtual standstill through the use of a (insert Dr Evil voice here) “super-sonic parachute” and “propulsion jets”. It is fair to say that this was a rather large gamble. Now, you are probably thinking that we are going to espouse some far-fetch theory that it was actually done in a studio, and that the space-craft never actually left the Earth. Not so. They did it alright, but why?

NASA stated that their reason for launching such an ambitious mission was that they want to see if any past life forms have survived the intense radiation from the sun, by cutting through the surface of rocks with a “laser”. This is all done for the pursuit of knowledge. They want to gather more information which may in turn support the theory that life on Earth actually came from Mars, meaning we are all in fact Martians.

Yeah, probably true. But what if, in actual fact, the US government knows of some horrendous fate which awaits the Earth and we will inevitably need to vacate this planet and inhabit another? What if, and stick with us here, the Curiosity Rover is actually sizing up Mars as a place to colonise and continue the human race? Furthermore, what if their plan is to split the human race across two planets which will inevitably create a Space-ial tensions (like racial, see what we did there?) and we will quite literally have a war of the worlds!!!

Too far-fetched? Ok, how about this… The US government is in fact looking to start a mining operation on Mars so that they can stop depending on the Earth’s limited resources and become the next Gina Rinehart, of Space?

Yeah maybe not. But they are definitely up to something. But whatever the reason, huge props to NASA for being goddamn awesome at Space exploration. They get 5 gold self-luminous celestial bodies which consist of a mass of gas held together by its own gravity (stars) from us. To infinity and beyond! Ok, we’ll stop now.