I wonder who got the billion dollar contract to produce a microphone for the rover.
It’s unfathomable to me that there wasn’t a microphone prior. Serious lack of research acumen there.
Back in the Apollo Mission era, perfection was the key. Ingenuity, knowledge and the profound wisdom of the staff, Mission Control (under Gene Krantz), assembly scientists and engineers who built every component from the tiniest switch to the largest propulsion engines and rocket nodes was what made the first satellites, lunar probes, and then the Mission explorations of the Moon possible.
When NASA sent up the Hubble Space Telescope, my Dad fairly laughed when engineers and Mission operators couldn’t figure out why the images being sent back were so fuzzy.
“They ground the mirrors / lenses to the wrong shape,” He remarked, gleaming sardonically. He had a lot of experience with optometrists’ labs messing up the prescription of his eyeglass lenses, as he had such a remarkable combination of different eye diagnoses, astigmatism being one. It sometimes took three times to get it right.
Only one young optometrist was able to accomplish the feat without fail, although it was the lab the script was sent to that screwed the resulting lenses up occasionally. During the eye tests and examination, this doctor marveled at how sharp my Dad’s vision was despite the various things deteced. The doctor had to learn how to switch the various test lenses extremely quick, seconds between my Dad’s eyes beginning and obtaining focus.
In essence, his brain was like a highly sophisticated computer that required pinpoint accuracy and enormous speed with any input so that it could render the proper result to whatever questions or answers or ‘output’.
Dad still has the same awesome eyesight today despite his Parkinson diagnosis—though he is the most highly - functioning Parkinson patient his neurological specialist has ever seen in practice. My father requires his glasses to read from time to time, but it’s just for the stupid way publishers render text in books, magazines, etc that are just too small. I have great eyesight too, just a bit of near and astig, and get flustered over the tiny text idiodicy.
My Dad, who told me to write our Armed Forces about using a rail gun as a high-speed projectile weapon (saving millions of dollars). And designed and engineered many other things in his younger years thst I am not at liberty to discuss.
Still today he imparts wisdom to me about many things, and I could not pray for a better Daddy and father in my life, as well as my dear Mom. God Bless them.