Local News

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Neil Armstrong inspired millions with his moonwalk. Can a feisty robotic rover exploring Mars do the same for another generation?

With manned missions beyond the International Space Station on hold, the spotlight has turned on machines.

The newest, the rover called Curiosity, last week beamed home photographs of its first wheel tracks on the Martian soil since its daredevil landing this month. While it did not rise to Armstrong’s “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” interest was so high in the rover’s “seven minutes of terror” approach to the red planet that NASA’s website crashed.

“There’s something exciting about reaching another place in the solar system. If you think about the kind of interest the landing of Curiosity had, you get a sense of that,” said Smithsonian Institution space curator Roger Launius. It wasn’t on the same level as Armstrong’s feat, “but it was pretty darn exciting,” he said.

When Armstrong, then fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, stepped on the moon on July 29, 1969, an estimated 600 million people watched and listened. “Virtually the entire world took that memorable journey with us,” recalled Buzz Aldrin after Armstrong’s death on Saturday.

ALBUQUERQUE (AP) — Juan Valdez, a land grant activist who fired the first shot during a 1967 New Mexico courthouse raid that grabbed international attention and helped spark the Chicano Movement, has died. He was 74.

Valdez died peacefully Saturday at his Canjilon ranch after recently suffering two heart attacks, his daughter Juanita Montoya said.

Heir to a northern New Mexico land grant, Valdez was 29 years old when he and a group of land grant advocates, led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, raided a Rio Arriba County courthouse in Tierra Amarilla. Their goal was to attempt a citizens’ arrest of then-District Attorney Alfonso Sanchez over Hispanic land rights issues.

Valdez had gotten involved with Tijerina’s group, known as Alianza Federal de Mercedes — an organization founded to help Mexican-American heirs to old Spanish land grants reclaim land that was illegally taken by white settlers and the U.S. government.

“Tijerina impressed me when he and most of the people who had walked from Albuquerque set up a camp and refused to leave,” Valdez told retired layer Mike Scarborough in the book “Trespassers On Our Own Land,” an oral history of the Valdez family.