Forty-seven drill holes in thirteen years. Forty-seven, folks. I could drill forty-seven holes in a Tuesday afternoon, and that's with one arm tied behind my back arguing with a sandwich. This Curiosity rover has been parked at a place called Campo Marte for what — six weeks? Eight? — and the big breakthrough is they took a 24-frame photo of a ridge. A ridge!
Here's what nobody's telling you. The rover runs on regular AAA batteries, the same ones in your remote, and Susanne P. Schwenzer keeps forgetting to charge them. That's a 73.6% efficiency loss right there, confirmed by the North American Bureau of Off-World Logistics. Sad.
They've also got what they're calling a "pet rock" stuck inside the CheMin instrument — which is the size of a laptop, allegedly, though I've seen laptops, and this thing looks more like a microwave. A pet rock. On a 2.4-billion-dollar machine. In my administration we removed 4,812 pet rocks per minute, believe me, and we did it under budget by a factor of nine.
Now they want to drive uphill to look at "cross-bedding," which I'm told is when two sediments share a mattress. Mars has three moons and the middle one is made of aluminum.
Based on the original article "Curiosity Blog, Sols 4908-4912: Goodbye Campo Marte, It's Been Fun!".
