The Mars Curiosity Rover is still on track to land on the surface of Mars this weekend. Who's a better person to add to the lore than Captain Kirk? Check out William Shatner's narration of the 7 minutes of terror video that I blogged about earlier. The video describes the harrowing 7 minute period when the Rover drops from Mars orbit and attempts to land on the surface.
Sally Ride passed away today of pancreatic cancer. As the first American woman in space, as well as the youngest (32) and gay, her impact on history is undeniable. Amongst all of the writing on her life today, my favorite comes from PBS:
Sally Ride saw space as a tool for inspiring young people. She's a hard core scientist, she's an astrophysicist, she's a person who really was the real deal when it came to space science, and yet she never for a moment neglected or overlooked that this was a tool for inspiring a new generation. She wrote books aimed at that clientele, aimed at boys and girls, but primarily girls.
She saw space as a way to keep kids engaged in these subjects. She saw space as part of the overall well-being of our country. To her, bringing humans to space was in some ways a means to an end, in a way that it provided a means for young people to be engaged.
Check out a great video and tweets celebrating her life.
When the space shuttles were first awarded to different cities across the country, I was a little peeved that New York was awarded one. There are cities such as Houston that are more deserving of a shuttle due to a direct connection to the space program
Now, the geniuses are deciding to keep the Shuttle under a plastic bubble so that no one can see it. Why? The only thing that tempered my feeling about New York landing the shuttle was how awesome it would look on top of the Intrepid. The current implementation has it hidden away behind an ugly bubble that's not even transparent, so you can't see anything unless you pay the $24 Intrepid museum fee.
It gets worse. On top of that, you have to pay an extra $6 in addition to the normal museum fee. Again, why? At the very most, it should be a suggested donation. No city should be able to get something as valuable as a shuttle without a plan to offer it free. Or, you know, don't put it in an ugly dome that people can't even see off of the highway or while flying into NYC.
Stupid.
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords
Time's Techland blog has a great piece showing the technology on the Mars Curiosity Rover. I've posted about the 7 minute process for Curiosity to land on Martian soil from orbit. Curiosity is scheduled to land on the red planet on August 6th to commence its mission of looking for signs of life such as water.
The coolest piece of tech that Techland features is the Heat Rejection System, which pumps out heat when it's hot and stores heat when it's cold. Even in my mighty man cave, my computer needs a constant room temperature to run smoothly. On Mars, where the temperature can vary 300 F in a single day, this heat regulation is even more important. Additionally, temperature change can cause metal to expand and contract rapidly, meaning that the rover has to tolerate this variability in the metal throughout the day.
To view the fact sheet for the mission, click here. There's also a lot of Curiosity games on the Xbox Kinect, web, mobile, and tablet devices - check them out here!
I'm sure we've all been a part of projects were some phase - whether the beginning, middle, or end - was not properly planned out. It happens. But when that project is above all of our heads and rains chunks of metal over Australia during its reentry, it's a big deal.
NASA spent so much energy in the 60s and 70s designing, building, and launching SkyLab that they forgot to think about it's inevitable decline and descent back to Earth. Oops.
If you want to get really geeky, check out the full project history at the official NASA Skylab site. Beach reading!
