Watch the Spirit Mars rover in unreal time
There's a cool high-speed version of the first ninety sols (days) of the Spirit mission available in various video formats on this page:
Look for "90 Sols in 90 Seconds."
There's a cool high-speed version of the first ninety sols (days) of the Spirit mission available in various video formats on this page:
Look for "90 Sols in 90 Seconds."
This week's issue of Science magazine contains a number of articles describing results from the Cassini flyby of Saturn's moon, Titan. The following summary was derived from a high-speed pass through the abstracts that dealt with the planetary conditions (I couldn't think of a way to usefully summarize the various ionosphere/magnetosphere papers):
Titan has a complex surface with domes, flows and channels reminiscent of volcanic activity, possibly composed of ice and various organic compounds. Its atmosphere contains nitrogen, methane (1.6%), acetylene, ethylene, diacetylene, argon, hydrogen cyanide, various carbon-nitrile compounds and carbon monoxide, though methane was the only carbon molecule detectable by UV imaging below 600 km altitude. "The bulk composition and thermal structure of the moon's upper atmosphere do not appear to have changed considerably since the Voyager 1 flyby."
Other things that struck me from this week's issue:
Mitochondrial evidence suggests that the dispersal of people out of Africa into Eurasia followed a single path through India and then into southeast Asia and Australasia, with an early offshoot leading to the Near East and Europe. The move from India to Australia 65,000 years ago was "fast," taking "only a few thousand years."
Based on single-nucleotide-polymorphism analysis, all the world's leprosy appears to derive from a single clone that started in East Africa or the Near East and spread with human migration, being introduced to West Africa and the Americas only within the last five hundred years. [Note that the "single clone" bit is significant, as this is even more specific than saying "a single strain" would be. It's the difference between saying that all the dogs in Chicago are collies versus saying they're all the offspring of Lassie.]
All papers cited above appear in volume 308, issue 5724.
Operating well, well past its defined mission lifetime (three months -- it's been over a year!) Opportunity successfully made its way out of a sand pit this weekend. NASA engineers developed an escape strategy using a model and a sand pit here on Earth.
Bravo.
NASA's Deep Impact mission has successfully whacked comet Tempel I with a copper impactor, cratering it. This was one of four imagined outcomes, the other three being "sinking in," "passing through," and "obliterating the comet." The point of the mission is to crack the comet a little (as has now been done) and then do IR and visual analysis of the comet and ejecta to get a read on what a comet is actually made of.
Malaysia wants to put a person on the moon by 2020.
Malaysia is a nation of seemingly limitless ambition.
Having already built what were the world's tallest buildings, it must seem only a short hop from there to the moon.
But there are still serious obstacles to overcome.
On Saturday, the first group from a shortlist of more than 800 would-be astronauts set out to run 3.5km (two miles) in a leisurely 20 minutes.
All were hoping to claim Malaysia's seat on a Russian-led space mission, scheduled for 2007.
But only 12 out of 31 taking part passed the test.
Some observers wondered whether their performance might be linked to the local diet.
Earlier this year, the country announced a programme to put Malaysia's favourite foods into space.
A team is to be sent to Houston in Texas to find out how to process teh tarik (sweet tea), roti canai (flaky griddled pancakes) and nasi lemak (coconut rice) for consumption in zero gravity.
All are absolutely delicious, but rather fattening.
However, no one should write off Malaysia's chances of achieving its latest goal.
If they're seriously focusing on figuring out how to make their national foods in space, then I may have to write them off. It's not as if the stuff Americans ate on the moon shots looked much like normal food. I've had the ice cream...
Still, it's notable that they've set it as a goal. Belated space race with China?
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to successfully insert itself into Martian orbit today with no problems.
The Spirit rover continues its trek to its target wintering spot on the north slope of McCool Hill, despite the complete loss of function in one of its wheels.
You can always check on the status of your favorite pair of beautifully over-engineered rovers here.
They're now almost 785% over their projected mission end date.
Two years ago, NASA's Genesis spacecraft gently reentered the atmosphere with its cargo of solar wind particles and then plowed straight into the Utah countryside at about two hundred miles per hour, cracking those cargo containers and making a mess of its samples.
So what happened?
Apparently, its gravity sensors were installed upside down.
...and a centrifuge test that would have caught the problem was canceled from the manufacturing process by the builder, Lockheed-Martin. Notably, this was a design rather than an installation error -- the sensors were drawn in upside down in the specs.
Lockheed-Martin's recent record is a little patchy in terms of simple errors screwing up big space projects:
Similar oversight has led to several previous losses, including the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was lost in 1999 because engineers used navigation measurements in both metric and English and failed to make conversions.
The same year, the Mars Polar Lander, was doomed by a software design error that caused the probe's descent engine to shut down early as it prepared for touchdown.
In a brief statement acknowledging the report, Lockheed Martin, which also built the two failed Mars probes, said, "The Genesis mission serves to again remind us just how demanding space exploration always is and how exact our efforts must be."
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to parakkum in the Space category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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