Five hundred small details

Among aficionados of men’s fashion, Cary Grant is as revered for his meticulous style as for his acting. His most celebrated suit—the lightweight woolen one he wore throughout North by Northwest—was made at his request by his Savile Row tailor, Kilgour, French and Stanbury. “It takes five hundred small details to make one favorable impression,” he once said.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest Cary Grant plays an advertising executive who becomes enmeshed in an espionage plot that takes him from Manhattan to Mount Rushmore.

NASA’s Curiosity rover certainly made a favorable impression on 6 August when it landed safely on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars. The nuclear-powered, car-sized vehicle was built by three principal contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and MacDonald Dettwiler, but many other organizations—universities, national labs, and companies—contributed their expertise.

Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate, supplied software that engineers used to help design the rover and to manage the more than one terabyte of data that the mission generated even before a physical prototype was built. Siemens was so proud of its role that it took out a full-color, full-page ad in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal in celebration.

Though far smaller than Siemens, Ocean Optics is just as proud of its contribution to Curiosity. The company, which is based in Dunedin, Florida, sent me a press release about its three compact, high-resolution spectrometers that form part of the rover’s ChemCam instrument. Developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and France’s Centre d’Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements, ChemCam will fire its pulsed laser at Martian rocks to vaporize their surfaces. By analyzing the vapor, the Ocean Optics spectrometers will help determine the rocks’ chemical composition.

I’m not sure how many individuals have contributed to Curiosity. By Nature‘s count , the number of scientists—just scientists—is 400. They and their colleagues in other professions have pulled off a remarkable coup.

Among Cary Grant’s films, my favorites are three he made under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock: Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), and North by Northwest (1959). Like most of Hitchcock’s films, all three had modestly sized casts, but Grant did star in a full-blown, cast-of-thousands historical epic. Directed by Stanley Kramer and set amid Napoleon’s struggle to conquer Spain and Portugal, the 1957 film bears a title that could be justifiably applied to a documentary about the making of the Curiosity rover: The Pride and the Passion .