I was there. It was amazing. Rutan’s a showman as well as an inventor. Drove all night from Silicon Valley to Mojave to see the flight. Turned around and drove back. I’ll post photos later. I haven’t slept more than half an hour in the past two days, so I must take a nap. Update: [...]
Oh my ghu, Spirit’s really gone and anthropomorphized herself. And Hubble’s getting philosophical about death. I’m waiting for Mars 3 to slap them upside the head with a dialectical clue.
[ via Oliver Morton ] Planetologist Jeffrey Bell doesn’t think much of Mars. If the planetary science crowd gets excited over some feature, Bell harumphs from behind his desk at the University of Hawaii, and points to an analog he says he can find by walking around the campus or by asking a passing vulcanologist. [...]
The caldera of the largest volcano in the the Solar System: detailed images from the ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft.
The recent photo MER-B (Opportunity) took of its backshell and parachute on the Martian plains might remind you of a find made by Apollo 12, the second human landing on the Moon. Astronauts Bean and Conrad landed their ship about 600 feet away from the Surveyor 3 spacecraft that had arrived a couple of years [...]
I think you could do no worse on this anniversary of the loss of the Columbia than to pour a finger’s worth from that bottle of scotch you hid behind the fridge, and watch Cowboy Bebop Session 19, Wild Horses.
Last year, after Columbia fell to pieces above us, Ken MacLeod wrote in Ansible: Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Ramon. Komarov, Grissom, White, Chaffee, Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsayev, Resnick, Scobee, Smith, McNair, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Onizuka. These names will be written under other skies. Since the Mars rovers have landed, all those names, except for the [...]
Mars welcomes their new, carbon-based, conservative masters. 10. American troops sure to be greeted as liberators.
A QuickTime VR panorama from a high resolution, 360° photo taken from MER-A (Spirit). The landmarks on the horizon are called out with annotations. Beautiful.
Photo of photos from Spirit (MER 1) at Gusev Crater, Mars. Yes! Update: Credit: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now My friend Beth says in a comment to a friend’s blog: [w]hat a fine time to be raising a child. “Look, child, we put a big truck on mars with a radio and it’s talking to us!”
The Stardust space probe took this detailed photo of a comet’s nucleus yesterday.
Your light cone is the portion of the universe that you could had influenced. It grows at the the speed of light from the moment you are born (okay, that’s fudging things, but bear with the assumption.) Matt Web has a tool to let you generate your light cone, in terms of nearby stars, as [...]
A gloriously hair-brained idea: moving Mars to a more human hospitable orbit by sending asteroids past it. It takes 12,000 years, but hey, these things take time. Or, as Professor John McCarthy, inventor of LISP, and proposer of this venture, says: If speculation on a large scale offends you, too bad for you.
[ via Amy T. ] A map of universe, starting at the modest scale of 12.5 light years, and extending to the whole visible thing. It also has some sidebars on topics such as defining distances in an expanding universe.