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Spirit Worksite Flyover
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took detailed, 3D images of the “Columbia Hills” region inside Mars’ Gusev Crater. The Spirit rover has been exploring this area since 2004, and NASA has used the images to create an imaginary flyover.Link
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Immense Ice Deposits Found on Mars
The European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft has found a deposit of water ice at Mars’ southern pole which is sufficiently large to cover the the entire planet in water 36 feet deep. Looks like we might not need to import water when we start terraforming.Link
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NASA Protocol for Crazy Astronauts
Nice to know there is one. If you’re a NASA astronaut and you totally flip out in space, your crewmates are instructed to restrain you with duct tape, tie you down with bungee cords, and inject you with the anti-psychotic drug Haldol or a tranquilizer like Valium. Link (via BoingBoing)
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Mark Your Calendars
Just a reminder: There will be a full lunar eclipse tomorrow. It starts at 5:44 p.m. ET, so it’ll already be underway when the moon rises in the U.S. The Western half of the country will miss the show. (Finally–a reason to thank Shadow for making me move back East.)Link
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Public Domain Space Paintings
Some lovely paintings of space colonies and other cosmic scenes, from “a future we forgot to have,” have been granted a Creative Commons license by the artist, Donald Davis. He was commissioned to do these in the 70s by NASA, and is now turning them over to the public domain. There’s some really neat, evocative…
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In Saturn’s Shadow
NASA has some great photos of Saturn from Cassini, including a view of Earth from nearly a billion miles away. With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world. Link
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Ads in Spaaaace
This is just silly. JP Aerospace is currently lining up customers for their next flight in April. Your advertisement will be carried aloft to 100,000 feet – and photographed against the boundary between the Earth and outer space. So you can pay an aerospace concern to fly a small advertisement midway up into the stratosphere…
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“Look, You’re British, So Scale it Back a Bit.”
Eddie Izzard notwithstanding, Britain has announced that it may plan a couple of solo moon missions. Entitled, of all things, “Moonlight” and “Moonraker.”Link
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We’ll Avoid the Obvious “Out of This World Jewelry” Title
A long-standing geological mystery about the origin of black diamonds has apparently been resolved: They’re from outer space.Brookhaven National Laboratory used infrared-detection instruments to analyze the hydrogen in some black diamond samples and found that the quantity indicated that the mineral formed in a supernova explosion. It’s theorized that the diamonds–which are never found in…
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Alien Probe Lands! Slaughters Millions!
A new report suggests that that the probes NASA sent to Mars 30 years ago to look for life may have found it and, um, killed it. The Viking missions were looking for Earth-type life, and the experiments that they conducted would likely have been fatal to the type of hydrogen peroxide-based life scientists now…