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I just saw a photo of the Death Valley National Park, taken from space, and it really is very very pretty.
If you have time to download 3Mb go to page listed blow, and click on the picture to see the full size image. It’s worth the effort.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17247
In an amusing story out earlier this week, it turns out that one of the NASA’s Mars Rovers has finally broken (somewhat).
The rovers, each designed to last 6 months, have been going for 2 years, and are still happily trunding around their landing sites doing really good science. The other day however one of the rovers broke a wheel. 1 of the 6 it has. And so with one wheel trailing it’s just continuing to roll around on it’s remaining 5 wheels. Now that’s what I call solid.
I have been poking around trying to find a good picture of the engraved gold plaque that was placed on the side of the Pioneer and Voyager space probes, which shows, among other things, the rough position of earth in relation to 14 pulsars (stars which pulse at a regular rate).
Eventually I found both a meduim sized and a large image of the plaque, but being finally able to see the image meant that I then had to figure out how to read binary so that I could make some sense of it.
My friend James often sings this little ditty that goes “If it hadn’t been for NASA I’d at least have stood on Mars”.
It almost always pops up whenever we are talking space exploration, with James claiming that NASAs beaurocratic nature has been and continues to be a restraining and inhibiting influence on humans space exploration, and me defending NASA and reminding him of all NASAs successes over the years.
Recently however the situation has become so rediculous that I find it impossibly hard to keep up my usual defense of NASA and it’s culture.
NASA has become so fixated on sticking with flying the (frankly ancient) space shuttles, while at the same time being morbidly unwilling to allow a launch if there is any concievable risk to the vehicle and crew.
The result of this is that they are jepordising continued manned space flight out of fear of public and political opinion, and the sad fact is that their delays may ultimately end up being just as harmful to their public image as any accident. The space station will stay unfinished (remember when it was going to have a 6 man crew and extensive science capabilities…), they will get beaten back to the moon by China or the Europeans. They will fail, ironically because they are afraid of failure.
Yay! Looks like the shuttle will be up and running again soon. More as it comes to hand…
I was poking around (being a bit of a geek (Ok, so nothing new there)) the other day, and found this article in Icarus (Volume 173, Issue 2, Pages 300-311) entitled “The calcium exosphere of Mercury” about how it would seem that Mercury has an exosphere around it’s poles composed of gaseous calcuim. Toasty….
