One check-in closer to being Mayor of Mars!
Damian’s TumblrOne check-in closer to being Mayor of Mars!
Europe - André Kuipers
I - ISS Over Europe
II - Wolgograd
III - London
IV - Amsterdam
V - Naples
VI - Paris
(Original Photo credit to NASA)
Guys. We send robots to Mars. So proud to be a human right now.
(gif via dresdencodak)
Also:
The nerds just took Gold in the 560 billion metres
—Eugene Byrne (via Paul Cornell via Ben Goldacre)
Challenges of Getting to Mars: Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror (by JPLnews)
(Via Spike Trotman.)
All going down live at 06:30 tomorrow morning (2012-08-06T05:31Z) apparently.
It looks a lot more complicated than Lunar Lander on my Commodore 64…
We posted this back in spring, but in case you missed it then: How Curiosity will land on Mars, in 11 easy steps.
Plus: The Anatomy of Curiosity.
I found lunar lander online!!
What in the balls. Look at that final descent phase! A rocket-powered sky crane?! NASA, that shit cray. What was wrong with packing your rover inside a high-tech Zorb like last time? I sometimes wonder if NASA engineers just like to prove what badasses they are. You’d think just getting something artificial to another planet would be enough proof. I hope it works. I really, really do.
The Venus Transit
Now we all have something in common with the people of 1882, when they had an opportunity to gaze into the sky and watch Venus cross the sun. Of course they didn’t have amazing visuals like this to see the event in high definition.
This won’t happen again for 105 years, which means our unborn baby probably won’t see this in its lifetime, unless medical science allows for a longer average lifespan. It’s hard to imagine what the earth will look like the next time humanity observes this phenomenon.
This is instantly recognisable as the logo for Nasa, despite its being discarded in 1992 in favour of the previous ‘meatball’ logo preferred by some Nasa insiders.
The ‘worm’ logo, and the graphic system it was part of, spoke to the idea of Nasa as high-tech, forward-looking, and united in purpose. It failed because Nasa, the actual real-world organization, is not any of those things. As an incoherent mish-mash of design elements, the ‘meatball’ expresses the reality of Nasa very well. Sadly.
NASA debunks 2012 hokum. Such a pity that a debunking is needed.
I also do wish they would write 21 December 2012 rather than 12-21-2012. But I guess they need to never miss an opportunity to remind us they are an American organization with weird American ways of writing the date and measuring things.
(Source: scientificamerican.com)
A Pennsylvania team called Pipistrel-USA has won $1.35 million from NASA after taking first place in the aviation and space agency’s CAFE Green Flight Challenge with an electric-powered plane called the Taurus G4.
Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists
The headline is slightly unfair. Their task was to speculate what might happen should aliens visit earth; given that premise, extermination on environmental grounds is not particularly difficult to imagine.
To an outsider it might seem strange that Nasa rejected the futuristic, modern, clean identity programme represented by the logo on the left, in favour of the cluttered, unprintable, and old-fashioned looking thing on the right.
NASA’s Two Logos: The Worm and the Meatball (via laughingsquid)
NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft successfully achieved orbit around Mercury at approximately 9 p.m. EDT Thursday. This marks the first time a spacecraft has accomplished this engineering and scientific milestone at our solar system’s innermost planet. (via NASA - MESSENGER - Unlocking the Secrets of Mercury)
