Sol 0

I have just been  part of  the most exciting science meeting I have ever yet been in for any work – MSL, or otherwise.  We have gone over today’s images and started to bring together our mapping work.  The sedimentologists like Sanjeev Gupta describe the alluvial fan that our landing ellipse intersects and show how we can apply models to it to start working out the history of water flow in Gale Crater.  Its mot part of the sedimentary hill but I think it is going to be very important.  We will have to gather ‘bread and butter’ data like particle sorting and shape to constrain the different hypotheses.  I cant go into too much detail here, at the moment, as it would be ripping off peoples’ ideas.

Lots of media interest and I enjoyed giving a talk via Skype to the National Space Centre, Leicester.  After that I did a few interviews with the online newspapers etc.  A frequent question is why is this important or why should money be spent on it?  Its a reasonable question, but after today’s work and the interest at the National Space Centre, including of children who might go on to study science and technology, I find myself drawn to the answer that if we didn’t do the Apollo landings, Galileo (mission to the Jupiter satellites and outer Solar System) and now perhaps Mars Science Laboratory, we would all be diminished in a way that is hard to measure but is significant. 

Roll on Sol 1!