On This Day: August 6

On This Day, for August 6, by Britannica.

I’m Kurt Heintz. Today we’re looking at

-A “curious” rover that changed the way we see our rocky red neighbor
-The birth of a star who’s got some ’splainin’ to do
-The death of a war—and of hundreds of thousands of people with it.

On this day in 2012, NASA's robotic vehicle Curiosity (also called Mars Science Laboratory) landed on Mars and, within hours, began transmitting high-definition video from the Red Planet’s surface.

The Curiosity rover is about 10 feet long and weighs about 2,000 pounds, which made it the longest and heaviest rover on Mars when it landed there. While it may be about the size of your average sedan, Curiosity comes with a few more features than what’s included in your standard technology package. Fitted with a neutron-beam generator, a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, a laser spectrometer, and several high-definition cameras, this rover has more scientific equipment than most high-school chemistry programs.

Curiosity was launched by an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on November 6, 2011. When the nine-month transit to Mars was done, the rover was ready to touch down on the red rocky planet. This is a risky and process for any off-world landing. But Curiosity’s novel approach had 15 critical steps in the landing sequence, and all of them had to be executed flawlessly for the mission to succeed. Here’s why.

Curiosity’s unique design and, in particular, its mass made its landing a risky affair. It was too big to be cushioned by air bags. Instead, it was lowered to the surface by three tethers from a “sky crane.” The sky crane was bundled with the rover in re-entry, after which the re-entry shield and parachutes separated from the sky crane and rover. The sky crane then used rockets to slow itself and the rover even further, lowering the rover by the three tethers to place it softly on its intended location. Once Curiosity touched the ground, the tethers were cut and the sky crane flew off and crashed into the Martian surface a safe distance away, as intended.
The whole re-entry and landing sequence took approximately seven minutes, an interval referred to in NASA circles as the “seven minutes of terror.” After those anxious minutes, Curiosity landed in Gale crater on this day in 2012 at 05:17 UTC (that’s Coordinated Universal Time), and scientists around the world took a deep breath before bursting into a cheer.

Once Curiosity was firmly planted on Mars, it performed system checks, and then set about making discoveries. Curiosity’s landing site, Gale crater, is at a low elevation. It was chosen because, if Mars ever had surface water, it would have pooled there.

Curiosity was unique in not relying on solar energy. Instead, it drew power from a thermoelectric power generator, with the heat source being the radioactive decay of plutonium and the heat sink being the Martian atmosphere. This internal power supply was designed to allow Curiosity to continue operating through the Martian winter and was planned to last one Martian year, about 687 Earth days.

In September 2012 Curiosity took pictures of what appears to be water-transported gravel, indicating that at one time Gale crater was likely the floor of an ancient stream. The rover also found traces of organic molecules preserved in rock layers 3.5 billion years old and evidence that the amount of methane in the Martian atmosphere varies with the seasons.

Curiosity defied expectations—including its expiration date. The rover was still exploring the Gale crater years after it was expected to cease operating. Both in scientific practice and in spacecraft design theory, the Curiosity rover represents a new chapter in technology, exploration, and life—on Earth and off it.

I’m Meg Matthias. Here are Fast Facts for August 6th.

American radio and motion-picture actress and television comedian Lucille Ball was born in Jamestown, New York, on this day in 1911.

Andy Warhol, the American artist and filmmaker, also has a birthday today. The leading figure of the 1960s Pop art movement was born on this day in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian Age in poetry, was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, on this day in 1809.

Diego Velázquez—the most important Spanish painter of the 1600s, whose brilliant diversity of brushstrokes and subtle harmonies of color made him a forerunner of 19th-century French Impressionism—died on this day in 1660.

After more than 300 years of British rule, Jamaica became an independent country within the Commonwealth of Nations on this day in 1962.

On this day in 1890, convicted murderer William Kemmler became the first person to be executed by electric chair; he was put to death in Auburn State Prison, New York.

American writer and director John Hughes, who established the modern American teen movie genre in the 1980s with films like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, died of a heart attack in Manhattan on this day in 2009.

And finally, on this day in 1926 Gertrude Ederle, age 19, of New York became the first woman to swim the English Channel, breaking the men's record by nearly two hours.

Hiroshima, whose name means “broad island,” is a Japanese city situated on the delta of the Ota River, whose six channels divide it into several islets. It was founded as a castle town by the feudal lord Mori Terumoto in the 16th century. From 1868 onward it was a military center, which made it a potential target for Allied bombing during World War II. However, the city was not attacked during the war—until an atomic bomb was dropped over it by a B-29 bomber of the U.S. Army Air Forces at about 8:15 in the morning on this day in 1945.

In 1939, physicists in the United States had learned of experiments in Germany demonstrating the possibility of nuclear fission, and they understood that the energy that process might release could perhaps be used as an explosive weapon of unprecedented power. On August 2 of that year, Albert Einstein warned U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt of the danger of Nazi Germany’s investigations in the development of an atomic bomb. In response, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development was created in June 1941 and was given joint responsibility with the War Department for the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. After four years of intensive and increasing research and development efforts, an atomic device was set off on July 16, 1945, in a desert area near Alamogordo, New Mexico, generating an explosive power equivalent to that of more than 15,000 tons of TNT. Thus the atomic bomb was born.

Less than two weeks after being sworn in as Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry S. Truman received a long report from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. “Within four months,” it began, “we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history.” Truman calculated that this monstrous weapon might be used to defeat Japan in a way less costly in American lives than a conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland would be. For Truman, Japan’s unsatisfactory response to the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration, which called for the unconditional surrender of Japan, decided the matter. At a press conference, Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro had responded to the ultimatum with the word “Mokusatsu.” The translation of that word would become the source of much debate. While the press largely reported that Suzuki was refusing or ignoring the declaration, others later noted that “Mokusatsu” could be translated as “No comment.”

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb carried from Tinian Island in the Marianas in a specially equipped B-29 bomber was dropped over Hiroshima, at the southern end of the island of Honshu. The combined heat and force of the blast instantly and almost completely devastated 4.4 square miles of the heart of this city of 343,000 inhabitants. Of this number, some 70,000 were killed immediately, and by the end of the year the death toll had surpassed 100,000. More than 67 percent of the city’s structures were destroyed or damaged.

It is difficult to comprehend the damage that was caused, but it helps to hear what happened from someone who was actually there. Kaleria Palchikoff, a Russian immigrant who was living in a suburb of Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped, was relatively unharmed by the incident, save for a gash on the head she sustained when her house fell in. She and her family made their way to the nearest hospital, where she helped doctors administer care to the victims. She gave her account of the experience to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey in December of 1945. Here is what she saw. We caution you: She gives a graphic description.

Well, the bomb dropped at about a quarter to eight. It was just a flash, I believe, but I didn’t notice, or have time to notice, what it was all about. So, when the flash came, the house tumbled down on us.…When we went outside, we didn’t have to look towards the town, but if we only looked around our house, people started coming out—some bruised, some wounded, and some burned.…We started up the road towards the mountains…and we saw Negroes, just Negroes—they weren’t Japanese; they were Negroes—and I asked them, “What happened to you? What’s the matter with you?” and they said, “We saw the flash, and this is the color we turned.”…And there were people wounded, very badly wounded.…And I heard someone screeching from under a house. I tried to pull her out, but I couldn’t.…I just saw a hand, and I knew it was a woman’s hand. I couldn’t pick her out… Anyway, finally we reached the hospital, a military hospital… And they didn’t give anybody any water, even though they asked for water very badly.…As soon as they gave water to them, they’d vomit it all out, and they’d keep on vomiting until they died. Blood would rush out, and that was the end of them.…I stayed there for two days.…

… The skin would just peel off.…Some of them, you could see the bones. The eyes closed and the nose bled, the lips swelled and the ears swelled, and the whole head started swelling… Then on the second day… the wounds became yellow in color, and they’d go deeper and deeper. No matter how much you tried to take off the yellow rotten flesh, why, it would just go deeper and deeper. And I don’t think it pained them very much.…

There were about four different kinds of patients. The ones that die off within two or three days.…If people were burned more than one-third of the body, most of them died. Then there was a kind of patient that lived for maybe a week. They died from inhaling the gas, I think.…Then there was a kind of patient that lived through the burns. The burns got well, but in a month’s time they’d find their hair falling out and a very big temperature, and their throat would become very sore, and they’d turn very pale green, and they’d die off. And then there’s… people that have been in the area of this bomb, two kilometers in circumference, cannot live more than three years… People that had burns on their faces or hands or anywhere would not live more than three years too, even though they got better.

Now there is considerable debate about whether the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki were ethically justified. Virtually all of America’s political and military leadership, as well as most of those involved in the atomic bomb project, believed at the time that Truman’s decision to use this new weapon on large civilian populations was correct. There were no widespread significant international protests over the use of the atomic bomb in 1945. Most of the world seemed to have little sympathy for a nation they perceived as an aggressor responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Asia and the Pacific. From the beginning, however, many Americans thought that the advent of the atomic bomb had changed the world in a profound way, one that left them with a feeling of foreboding.

It is possible to construct scenarios in which the use of the atomic bomb might have been avoided, but most of the main actors in the events of 1945 faced a grim logic that yielded no easy alternatives. No one will ever know whether the war would have ended quickly without the atomic bomb or whether its use really saved more lives than it destroyed.

Thanks for listening today. Whether you’re looking for more information on the atomic age or searching for proof that there is still good in this world… or even on Mars… there’s always more to read and discover at Britannica.com. Our program was written by Emily Goldstein, who narrated the written testimony of Kaleria Palchikoff, which we found at the National Archives, in Washington, D.C. For Britannica, I’m Kurt Heintz. And I’m Meg Matthias.

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