Martian Exercise Program

Behold the exercise program for the Mars Curiosity rover – click to GIFinate. (Dammit WordPress, why aren’t you auto-animating?)

I strung these 17 images together from the Curiosity MSL image page and (painfully) aligned them in an order that sort of shows the instrument arm’s motion. (Anyone know of a good GIF editor that’s not Illustrator?)

This is some seriously bad-ass cable management. (More on the nearly-lost art of cable lacing here.)

Alas @linecook feels this is not representative of humanity.

It’s easy to forget that humans had their hands on this less than a year ago. I can imagine a JPL engineer at the bar: “No big deal, just my handwriting on Mars.”

(Also, I would love for the ChemCam team to take the laser and etch “CROATOAN” into a rock just to mess around with future Martian historians.)