This image of Victoria Crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at more of a sideways angle than earlier orbital images of this crater. The camera pointing was 22 degrees east of straight down, yielding a view comparable to looking at the landscape out an airplane window. East is at the top. The most interesting exposures of geological strata are in the steep walls of the crater, difficult to see from straight overhead. Especially prominent in this oblique view is a bright band near the top of the crater wall. Colors have been enhanced to make subtle differences more visible.
Total cost of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter program? $720 million or $0.72 billion.
Yeah, that’s me on the left… I was 11 years old there, and that white blotch was the TV picture screen. It’s hard to describe the impact on a young mind… Remember, those were the days of transistor radios. There was no cable television, let alone MTV. Cordless phones? Ha! No home computers, no CDs or DVDs, no calculators (though if you knew what you were doing with a decent K&E or Pickett slide rule you could hold your own.)
There was none of it. Yet there we were… All watching a human — an American! — walking on a Moon that was 240,000 miles away from all the rest of us. Stunning. Numbing. Inspiring. To put it all in perspective, the on-board computer on Apollo 11 contained a whopping 2 KB of RAM. Today, a $50 HP 33s scientific calculator from Staples contains 16 times that.
Indeed the times have changed. What was JFK’s dream of space flight in general has become routine and the stuff of amazing budget cuts. What once was the stuff of heroes like John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, et al has been replaced by “who“. (Go ahead and try to rattle off the names of the current shuttle crew or the ISS occupants… Do you even know what the acronym “ISS” stands for?)
Once we were a people of “can-do”, a society of folks who believed that engineers could do the impossible with virtually nothing, almost instantaneously. Now, we’re a litigation-happy agenda-driven politically-driven selfish-brat rabble who want everything and more with less than nothing, yesterday. But hey! At least we still have “The View”.
Forty years ago yesterday, three of the bravest men who ever lived started a journey no-one else had ever taken. Looking now at the craft in which they traveled, they were even braver than I remember thinking them back in July of 1969.
These were our heroes, and they were more than equal to the job at hand: going to the Moon!
Actually, it apparently got so mundane in the capsule, that 40 years ago today, July 17, 1969, the big news of the day was hearing and seeing Mike Collins discuss what the astronauts had to eat aboard Apollo 11.
Not bad… Not bad at all. We’re (the U.S.) going to basically photograph the entire moon down to a resolution of 10′ (See new pic below…)
Cratered area near moons Mare Nubium region
Yeah, I’ll say the words that everyone is thinking but no one dares utter for fear of being called “superficial” or “unsophisticated”… “Will we be able to see the moon buggies?” (We plunked three LRV or “Lunar Roving Vehicles” in Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17.) There, I said it, and the answer is probably, “just barely.”
That out of the way, you can follow the progress of this new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) here.
UPDATE:Sigh. Launch scrubbed due to liquid hydrogen leak. Next window for launch is July 11. Stay tuned…
Yup, NASA does it (or more accurately is doing it) again…
Photo courtesy NASA
But how big is the Endeavor really?
Putting a scale on it, if a six foot person were to stand next to the entire shuttle assembly (boosters, external tank, etc.), that would be roughly the same as laying a penny on a table and standing your thumb next to it and referencing to the web of your hand. How does it feel to be a penny?
The Endeavor weighs 4.5 million pounds at takeoff… So what does 4.5 million pounds mean? That’s 2,250 small cars sitting on the launch pad.
And the power needed to drive a beast like that? Let’s put it this way… If there were to be a catastrophic failure at liftoff, the resulting crater would probably be roughly 600′ in diameter and resemble the remains of a small nuclear weapon. (Check out: http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/68750/view/?service=0)
How fast does the vehicle go… Zero to 17,000 mph in about nine minutes.
Yup, the upcoming shuttle launch is a very big deal indeed… Don’t forget that you can watch it on NASA TV…
That’s from the navigation camera on the Mars rover Opportunity, picture series Sol 1850. The entire library of raw images from both Spirit and Opportunity is simply amazing… All told, that’s 234,780 pictures and counting from a five year mission designed to last only three months. (So far, the rovers have suffered a broken robotic arm, computer resets, and a stuck wheel. Still, they keep keeping on.)
A small, dense object only 12 miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. At the center of this image made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand.
In this image, the lowest energy X-rays that Chandra detects are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic ones are colored blue. Astronomers think that B1509 is about 1,700 years old and it is located about 17,000 light years away.
Neutron stars are created when massive stars run out of fuel and collapse. B1509 is spinning completely around almost 7 times every second and is releasing energy into its environment at a prodigious rate — presumably because it has an intense magnetic field at its surface, estimated to be 15 trillion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field.
The combination of rapid rotation and ultra-strong magnetic field makes B1509 one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators in the galaxy. This generator drives an energetic wind of electrons and ions away from the neutron star. As the electrons move through the magnetized nebula, they radiate away their energy and create the elaborate nebula seen by Chandra.
Image Credits: NASA/CXC/CfA/P. Slane et al.
So how big is the object in the photo? Well, 150 light years or 879,854,400,000,000 miles across. And the pulsar that’s spinning off this show? Just 240 blocks wide. Not bad… Not bad at all…
Just a heads up… You can use the “Resources and References” box on the right in our home page to access the NASA site… Just poke around a little in there and you’ll find beaucoup images free for the downloading. (And like the “CIA FactBook”, you can RSS feed the NASA site too.) Extraordinarily cool.
The last time we posted a NASA image (STS-119), we got quite a bit of traffic… Well, here’s another that isn’t quite so dramatic. (Though those who are following the “back to the moon” Orion Project will probably find this interesting. Besides, how in the name of Great Googly Moogly did we ever manage to put a human on the moon 40 years ago?)
Orion
Pretty cool, eh?
As a side note, I was talking with a couple of friends (more than a couple actually), and was tipped off to the fact that many folks are a little fuzzy regarding the concept of “RSS” “or “Really Short Syndication“. (Yeah yeah yeah… I know… That’s a bastardization of the real acronym. If you want more detailed info about RSS, you can check out a post I wrote here… And no, you won’t get spammed because I write that blog too.)
But to make a short story even shorter, RSS gives a Web explorer like you access to collections of articles from a fixed source. Add more RSS feeds (like NASA, Grand Rants, etc.) and you’ve got more info at your fingertips. Anyway, check it out…
I’m sorry… I know we here at Grand Rants almost always deal with things both political science and social… But this is just way too cool!
Discovery from above
Image credit: NASA
This is from the current STS-119 mission – the one that’s delivering the last set of solar wings to the ISS. To read more about this or download the full-sized image, click here.
A Russian satellite and an American satellite collided Tuesday scattering hundreds if not thousands of pieces of debris willy nilly. The upshot is that this doesn’t look like a disaster, at least, not right now..
But these are the things that give engineers such as myself fits concerning technology, non-destructive and otherwise…It’s the goofy stuff that may get us…
On Jan 25, 1995, a miscommunication between Norway and Russia triggered Russia’s early warning radar system. Not good.
Astronaut Lisa Nowak turned out to have had some pretty serious mental issues. She’s not exactly who we want in a space shuttle.
And there are little issues like Chernobyl, the Kursk, N. Korea, Iran, and China
Oh, there will be another mushroom cloud, but IMHO, it won’t come to pass because of direct anger. It probably will just be a screw up, just like two satellites colliding in space.
Posted by Alan Speakman 
Posted by Alan Speakman 
Posted by Stoutcat 
