As Curiosity was landing safely on Mars, many of you noted that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers orchestrating the whole thing were eating an awful lot of peanuts. In fact, each workstation boasted a little commemorative jar of peanuts. Seriously, what is up with all those peanuts?
Discovery News has an answer. And it's surprisingly interesting.
Turns out, this is a JPL-specific tradition, dating back to 1964, when the lab's funding was on the line after the Ranger program—unmanned missions to photograph the Moon—weren't living up to expectations. In fact, six Ranger missions in a row had failed.
This was the heritage leading up to Ranger 7. There was talk that JPL should be shut down, that a university-affiliated center couldn't handle a rigorous spaceflight program. There were suggestions that the program had been sabotaged — a worker found a small polyethylene bag with 14 screws and a lock washer in one of the sealed electronic modules in Ranger 7's television subsystem.
Just before Ranger 7 launched to the moon on July 28, mission manager Harris Schurmeier handed out peanuts to ease tensions. He figured chewing or playing with them on the table would give his team something else to focus on.
The full story is pretty neat. You can read the rest at Discovery News
Via Ed Yong
