耗资25亿美元之后,NASA终于把太空史上最大的火星车“好奇号”送到了目的地。在预算受限的情况下,“好奇号”所取得的非凡成功掩盖了一个关于太空探索的重大真相:它需要狂热的信仰和对失败的超高容忍度。就在“好奇号”登陆火星前的几分钟内,美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室任务控制中心的人们吃掉了一堆花生。在喷气推进实验室,每当有航天器准备登陆,花生都是必不可少的东西,这个习惯始于1964年7月31日,当时“徘徊者7号”无人探测器正在准备登陆月球。“徘徊者号”探测器的任务很简单:撞击月球表面,在撞毁前拍摄几千张图片传回地球。纵使这样,在它之前的六颗“徘徊者号”探测器都未能成功完成任务,喷气推进实验室的工程师们知道他们快要没机会了。“徘徊者7 After costing 2.5 billion U.S. dollars, NASA has finally sent its biggest rover ”Curiosity“ in space history to its destination. With limited budget, the extraordinary success of Curiosity masks a big truth about space exploration: it requires fanaticism and tolerance for failure. Just minutes before the ”curiosity“ landed on Mars, people at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Mission Control Center ate a bunch of peanuts. In the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, peanuts are an essential part of any spacecraft to land on, a practice that began on July 31, 1964, when the Prowler No. 7 Unmanned Landing Vehicle was preparing to land Moon. The mission of Prowler is simple: hit the moon’s surface and shoot thousands of images back to Earth before crashing. Even so, none of the six Prowler detectors before it succeeded, and the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew they were about to get a chance. ”Prowler 7