While you sit around the dining room table this holiday season, proud of yourself for assembling your children and placing a home-cooked meal in front of them, take a moment to think about the Beattys of Asheville, NC. They recently built a museum-quality curiosity rover.

The family tradition began when daughter Camille Beatty was 10-years-old and asked her father, Robert, about the components of a dismantled TV remote control. Three years later, the Beatty family, including 11-year-old daughter Genevieve, faux Curiosity Rover is set up at the New York Hall of Science, where half a million annual visitors can drive it around a fake Martian landscape. But, we know, you’re proud that Steve made second honors this semester.

The Beatty’s have received a number of requests for other robotic projects from around the world. “It’s sometimes irritating when the girls have to do homework,” said patriarch Robert Beatty. “I’d rather be building robots with them.”  

Two other projects that the Beatty family has built include a computer-guided milling machine that can be used to carve out metal, plastic, and other materials. Once again, don’t feel bad. We’re sure that the green bean dish that your daughter is making for Christmas is the milling machine of casseroles.

The Beatty family also built a wireless telegraph. Quieter than Morse code, the machine keys to an Arduino Nano microcontroller, a speaker and a UHF radio in order to communicate up to a mile away.

Every family is different, but it’s hard to imagine a more innovative one that the Beatty family. Here’s hoping that whatever planet NASA decides to explore next, Robert Beatty and his daughter will be right there with us, building a full-scale museum-ready replica of the rover we use to traverse that planet’s surface.