By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
The discovery of an Earth-sized planet (artist's impression pictured) in Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to Earth, is announced.
News from Wikipedia. I still get a giddy thrill from news like this, just like I did when I was a kid. To boldly go~
Posted last today, so it would appear as the first post on my site for a while :)
It was a warm early morning in Sydney when I stayed up late to watch the launch of NASA's Curiosity rover. Staring into my iTelephone screen in the pitch blackness of my bedroom, I watched in awe and child-like excitement seeing the rocket blast off into the sky. From the original post:
Whereas during STS-135 I watched with baited breath on my MacBook Pro, this time I elected to witness the event on my iTelephone, which the NASA site accommodated with an iOS link next to the primary video feed.
Despite being roughly half a minute behind the live picture during the feed, I got a quiet, giddy thrill from watching the launch in a darkened room, from my bed, with my iTelephone in hand. For the first time in ages, I felt like I was living in the future.
Now here we are six months later and...
From the NASA site:
This [image shown at the top of this post] is one of the first images taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars on the morning of Aug. 6, 2012. It was taken through a fisheye wide-angle lens on the left "eye" of a stereo pair of Hazard-Avoidance cameras on the left-rear side of the rover.
The logistics of launching such a massive vehicle into the sky, sending it millions of kilometres, have it land safely with a hovering sky tethering system, rebroadcasting images and commands via a satellite previously launched and placed into orbit around the Martian planet... so this guy can include this image on his weblog. Well, among other uses, but you get the drift. There's a pun about Martian dust storms there somewhere.
The preciousness of those pixels. Once again, I'm at a loss for words.
Science is beautiful.
As well as seeing a friend off in the wee hours of the morning, the other reason I didn't get much sleep last night was due to staying up until 02:00 to watch NASA's Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory launch!
From NASA's website, accompanying their photo of the day of the launch:
The Atlantic Ocean provides a backdrop as the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket clears the tower at Space Launch Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Sealed inside the rocket's protective payload fairing is NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft, beginning a 9-month interplanetary cruise to Mars. Liftoff was at 10:02 a.m. EST Nov. 26. MSL's components include a car-sized rover, Curiosity, which has 10 science instruments designed to search for signs of life, including methane, and help determine if the gas is from a biological or geological source.
You read that right, the size of a car. Whereas Spirit and Opportunity were far larger than the original little Mars rover, this is another step up entirely. I'm quivering with anticipation over what it will teach us, assuming it's voyage to Mars is without incident. This is the stuff of dreams right here ^_^.
Whereas during STS-135 I watched with baited breath on my MacBook Pro, this time I elected to witness the event on my iTelephone, which the NASA site accommodated with an iOS link next to the primary video feed.
Despite being roughly half a minute behind the live picture during the feed, I got a quiet, giddy thrill from watching the launch in a darkened room, from my bed, with my iTelephone in hand. For the first time in ages, I felt like I was living in the future.
The most breathtaking screenshot I took above was unfortunately burdened with all the chrome of the iPhone superimposed on it, but the shots below I got without anything else. The picture quality was incredible.
Atlantis launched this morning, and the Space Shuttle program were a symbol of America's scientific prestige, of yesterday. It's all been said already, but I want to go on record too.
After World War II, the Soviets and Americans developed their respective (and initially German derived) rocket technologies to target each other as ICBMs, not the stars. With the launch of Sputnik and the resulting achievement it had in capturing people's minds and imaginations (and the propaganda potential it had), the Space Race began in earnest. Within two decades, the Soviets had launched a satellite and placed a man in space, and the Americans had put men on the moon.
The Space Shuttle was an attempt starting in the 1970s to develop a reusable launch craft. Six were built in total, and from the 1980s to this morning, they carried out 135 successful missions. Two ended with the deaths of 14 brave astronauts, and their sacrifice has not been forgotten.
(Photo by Robert Scoble, viewed on Google+ moments after the launch and later on his blog. Thank you for the Creative Commons licence Robert, and for sharing the experience)
Once the symbol of what the "Free World" can accomplish, in 2011 we find ourselves with a battered and crumbing United States. While the rich continue to reap the benefits of their congressional puppets, the rest of the economy is in shambles. A decade of pointless wars and two cowardly presidents refusing to end them has bankrupted their government, leaving little for programs that help people, let alone advancing scientific and medical research.
The Space Shuttle program ended this morning, and along with it any permanent plan for Americans to regularly launch manned space missions. I wasn't as upset at the end of the shuttles themselves as I was of this fact.
Of course this doesn't mean the end of space exploration in our lifetimes, other countries are stepping up to the plate and filling the vacuum of imagination. The Russians can continue to launch Americans into space, and there's no doubt the Chinese will be sending their own people up. As far as I know the ESA and JAXA are also continuing to receive funding.
I'm also confident that with a forward thinking government, America can regain what she's lost here. We have the technology, expertise, financing, imagination and love in the world to feed, educate, house and employ everyone, and give them all internet access so they can watch our astronauts land on Mars and other places in the heavens. I fundamentally believe this, and I'm not often this blunt, but if you don't agree, you're Wrong™.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read those massive photo coffee table space books my parents bought me when I was a kid.
Just watched the live launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on NASA TV. Congratulations to the entire team for a safe take-off and successful orbit.
The last flight in the programme. Beautiful. Bittersweet. I cried like a baby. Safe trip.
We've come so far in some ways, but tragically not so in others. I guess I'm just a little disillusioned at all the squandered potential.
I haven't been this dumbfoundedly awestruck in a very, very long time; why I've even started making up contractions. NASA has made available some of the first high resolution images and HD videos of the sun taken from the shiny Solar Dynamics Observatory. If you haven't checked it out yet, do it now, unless you're in a place where having your jaw drop to the floor might be embarrassing.
I'm so glad to be alive in this period of time, and deeply humbled at the same time. Galileo could have only dreamed of seeing such images.
A big manhug and thanks to Ken Jones for sharing this story in Google Reader.
BBC World reports from The World which is useful for me because I live there. Genius, right? One of their latest stories concerns a NASA mission whereby they'll be deliberately crashing two spacecraft into the moon to determine whether or not water ice exists.
@bbcworld: Nasa is set to deliberately crash two spacecraft into the Moon to try to learn whether there is water-ice on i.. http://bit.ly/hqUYM
Well that blockquote didn't really introduce anything I hadn't already mentioned. I'm better at summarising than I thought I was.
Leaving aside the knee jerk reaction I had initially ("oh great, humans are going to start dumping garbage on the moon now!") I thought of a way they could accomplish this without having to invest money in new procedures. Get a team together and inform them they want a probe that will orbit the moon, and make sure some of the contractors are programming in metres, some in feet. We know this works already!
I say this with confidence because I'm perfect and never make mistakes, of course.
As you may already be aware I'm an obsessively obsessed person with an obsessively obsessed obsession for Twitter, the micro-blogging platform where you type what you're doing. It's such a stunningly simple yet horribly addictive site that I've posted updates to over 3500 times, and have made friends with so many people who not only have I have never met in person but are not even in the same city, country, time zone or planet as me!
ASIDE: I mentioned planet because I follow at least one person on Twitter who claims to not reside on Earth. Given the fact we have barely even begun to colonise the moon, I find myself doubting this person's residential claims, though maybe they work in a secret underground organisaion that my friend Frank Nora says is the real problem with the world right now. Damn those elitist underground people who want to undermine society to bring about a new world order and make us robotic slaves who will carry out their mission to build the world's largest mozzarella ball!
ASIDE: How did I end up discussing secret societies, cheese and colonising other planets on a post discussing Twitter? Is this a sign of a creative mind, or a deranged one?
All that said though, I fear that people who harvest profiles and add friends en-masse are slowly wrecking Twitter. If you've been on Twitter for a while you know what I'm talking about: getting a constant stream of emails informing you that John Doe is following you on Twitter along with 1000 other people, and that John Doe is being followed by only a dozen or so people.
That image is a screenshot of my inbox showing just messages from Twitter over the last month. Out of these, a small number are notifications from friends, and the rest are people who want to add me who are following thousands of people with only a few following them!
In so many situations online when people seem to be harvesting addresses or profiles and adding people I can understand the motivation: usually it's either to allow the harvester to spam or scam users. I find it somewhat more difficult to see the motivation here though: what do harvesters gain by attempting to befriend me on Twitter? Unless I add them back I receive none of their messages which may or may not include spam or links to phishing sites.
Am I missing something here? I don't understand what's going on!
119 is a fascinating number (the sum of primes, symmetry, important dates) Ruben Dons his Dad's Lab Coat (sound distance of a human scream, Mars has lousy acoustics, the Moon has none, Helium and Carbon Dioxide changing voices) and why do Americans write their dates Month/Day/Year when the rest of the world puts it Day/Month/Year?
Download MP3 ↓ 10:00 minutes, 6.4MiB
You can also stream it and view its Internet Archive page.