Curiosity Lands on Mars!

In one of NASA's better recent moments (after retiring the space shuttles things really only could go up...), the Curiosity rover landed successfully on Mars last night!!!  The picture above shows a depiction of the complicated landing apparatus that slowly lowered the rover to the Martian surface using cables while hovering in the air with thrusters.  All of this after a terrifying 6 minute mega-hot entry through the Martian atmosphere.  There were a lot of places where this could go wrong and, to be honest, after NASA's recent Mar's rover failures I was somewhat surprised this was so heavily publicized.  But NASA needed the win and the success will hopefully buoy support for future exploration missions!

In other news, I apologize profusely for being such a bad blogger and neglecting my posts at the end of the week.  I've been crazy busy at work and then I went out of town with friends this weekend and the time to post just never seemed to materialize.  My weekend was a lot of fun!  In addition to the exciting NASA news, I spent most of my weekend over in New Braunfels, TX where I saw a DJ known as Girl Talk at Whitewater Amphitheater with some of my newer Texas friends.  It is about a 3-4 hour drive out there from Houston depending on traffic so we left early Saturday afternoon, grabbed some food and checked into our hotel when we got there and then made our way to the concert which was a lot of fun!  Only downside was between the alcohol, dancing, hoards of people, and sweating, I did not intake an appropriate amount of agua and therefore I woke up ridiculously dehydrated and sporting a monster headache the following morning.  Lots of asprin and water revived me and we all then proceeded to float on tubes around the "horseshoe" of the Guadalupe River.  It was about a 3 hour float and there were a couple of rapids, the guys tried to swing on ropes into the river, and we brought a case of beer along so it was a good time.  The drive back wasn't as fun, but we made it and now I'm back to the incredibly busy grind.  I'll try harder to keep up with my posts this week!