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I know a lot of our readers are — like me — huge LEGO fans, and of course, we have lots of fans of the Mars Science Laboratory, a.k.a the Curiosity rover. One of our readers, Allen Eyler, just sent me an email on how disappointed he and many other rover fans are about the fact that LEGO has no plans to create a Curiosity toy model. However, LEGO has a website where users can submit prototype designs for LEGO projects and if 10,000 people vote for the design, then LEGO will consider mass-producing and marketing that design. Bring in Stephen Pakbaz, an engineer at JPL who was involved in some of the design and testing of the real Curiosity rover. He has now designed and built an amazing Curiosity rover in LEGO, at 1:20 scale. It features the same ‘rocker-bogie’ wheel action just like the real Curiosity rover, along with an articulating arm and a deployable mast.
It looks awesome and I’m already wanting to play with it! And just think of the great outreach for NASA and space exploration it would be to have a Lego Curiosity rover for sale in stores. We now just need our readers to help boost the votes for Curiosity as a LEGO toy model.
All you need to do is visit LEGO’s CUUSOO page for the Curiosity rover and cast your vote. You can see more images of the rover there, or at Stephen Pakbaz’s Flickr page, where there is even a video that shows how the rocker-bogie system works.
Let’s do this!
Curiosity is now on its way to Mars and is set for an exciting landing on August 6. Watch below the incredible, nail-biting video of how it is going to happen:
On a similar vein physics enthusiast Sascha Mehlhase of the Niels Bohr Institute @ the University of Copenhagen constructed a lego model of the ATLAS detector at the LHC, it is comprised of 9,500 pieces and took 81 hours to complete:
http://sascha.mehlhase.info/physics.php?open=atlaslego
I stopped buying lego many years ago and sold all I had… but if they started making models of real space probes I might just have to start up again!
Well I had a look around the internet and this was all I could find:
Spirit & Opportunity models (simplistic)
ISS model (impressive!)
Galileo space probe model (this is the kinda thing I’ve been looking for)
Hayabusa space probe (the only official one, as far as I can tell – and a pretty amazing model)
Wait, there’s more! Though these are only fan-made, and very simplistic:
Mariner 10
Galileo
Voyager 😀
Cassini-Huygens
my roomate’s step-sister makes $76 an hur on the computer. She has been out of a job for 7 months but last month her pay was $18384 just working on the computer for a few hours. Read more on this site ?????? http://hirebestfreelancer.blogspot.com