HOW MANY OF YOU
Sat enthralled as I did in front of the TV last Thursday, tense. Then suddenly, spontaneously threw your hands up and cheered, like all the scientists in that room full of monitoring stations, that you saw leap up in joy and relief as NASA and our own Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in Pasadena did the near-impossible, again: blasting off a rocket from Earth to Mars more than six months ago, into the red planet’s atmosphere, easing its speed down from 12,000 mph to 170. And then barely breathing for the “seven minutes of terror” as the module took over its own maneuvers (but the crew on Earth had to wait those seven minutes for the information to beam back), to safely drop the Perseverance rover (about the size of a small car) by parachute onto the Martian surface at a gentle 2 mph. Why, a Martian running alongside could have caught it, in their however-many arms.