TOM EATON: Paradoxically dazzling Mars landing offers welcome respite from local politics
But Perseverance is not apolitical as space nationalism is having a moment
The landing of Nasa’s Perseverance rover on Mars was good to watch, by which I mean there was almost nothing to see.
In this drone-swarmed, Attenborough-narrated era, in which it has become passé to see nature’s rarest and most secret events revealed in ultra-high-definition super-slowmo, the relative dullness of Nasa’s broadcast — robotically cutting between scientists staring anxiously at screens and a computer-generated image of the lander’s progress — was paradoxically dazzling. When you’re doing something that not even the all-seeing eye of modern cameras can show you’re doing something very special indeed...
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