NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover to take Lego form, thanks to voters
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover got its own official Lego avatar. The Mars Science Laboratory robot was picked by thousands of fans to be designed in toy brick form, and it joins a pantheon of other Red Planet spacecraft that have become popular playthings over the years.
The rover was picked after thousands of people voted to have it turned into a Lego set at a company website that lets layfolk submit their own ideas for Lego sets. Concepts with more than 10,000 votes are forwarded for consideration. The deadline was in September, just a month after Curiosity landed in Gale Crater, on Aug. 5.
The LEGO version was designed by Stephen Pakbaz, a mechanical engineer who worked on Curiosity while at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
-- Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times