NASA's Ashwin Vasavada talks Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity with Boing Boing

In April, 2011, Boing Boing (well, our photographer pal Joseph Linaschke) visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a peek inside the clean room where the Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft (MSL) were in the process of being built for launch in late 2011 from Florida. Our big photo gallery with gorgeous images shot by Joseph is here.

Around that same time, I spoke with Ashwin Vasavada, Deputy Project Scientist at JPL for the MSL mission, to understand more about how MSL works and what its creators hope to accomplish, how one scores a job designing interplanetary explorer robots, and how this updated Mars rover is (or is not) like an iPad.

• Read Boing Boing's conversation with Vasavada here.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: curiosity • jpl • Mars • MSL • space craft • space flight

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Deb Johnson

Thanks for this article! Really interesting and informative. So looking forward to the Mars Landing – hope it all goes okay – as do they all at NASA
http://twitter.com/sergior Sergio

Wow, didn’t know that Juan Pablo Montoya was both a brilliant race car driver and JPL scientist.
awjt

moar liek AWESOME Vasavada!!!