Mars transformers

Artist's impression of last time around

I was struck this morning by the news that NASA have succeeding in landing a rover, about the size of a small car, on the surface of Mars - a planet which varies between 50 million kilometres and 400 million kilometres away from us. With this landing operation not being that different from this artist's impression of the sky crane last time around. With the rover cunningly unfolding itself, presumably on the way down, so that it lands on its wheels. Science really does work.

Full size mock up of this time around

So the transformers which were all the thing when our children were young, perhaps thirty years ago now, were not completely preposterous.

PS: some of the other images turned up by Bing are credited to Getty Images and one Patrick T. Fallon. With the latter having no less than 18,836 images on the former. Clearly a busy chap. Images which you can either scrape off your screen - quite good enough for my purposes - or you can pay maybe £350 for a proper copy with a proper number of megabytes.

Reference 1: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/.

Reference 2: https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/patrick-t.-fallon?phrase=patrick%20t.%20fallon&sort=best.