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The Best of Spirit
The 80 Beats blog at Discover Magazine has a photo gallery of some of the best images taken by Spirit over the past six years. It’s inspiring. Incidentally, for those who found xkcd’s Spirit cartoon depressing (I know I did!), somebody re-captioned it. I like this version much better. Because I am a pollyanna.
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The Future of NASA
DaleB sent me a link to this analysis of President Obama’s new NASA budget, with the comment: One the one hand, the move to evolve from the “…technologies we’ve developed in the ’50’s and “60’s” is good. But I cannot get over the feeling that this is a big step back or at least off…
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Mind the Gap
Samuel Arbesman was recently re-reading Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, in which Sagan alludes to “some sort of cosmic Grand Central Station.” That inspired him to create the Milky Way Transit Authority map, laying out the arms of our galaxy in the format of a transit map. It’s just lovely, and so elegant in its simplicity.…
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Well Put
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“Be a Martian:” Crowdsourcing Data Analysis
Following the theory that humans will happily grind through boring tasks for the chance to win virtual “prizes,” NASA has teamed with Microsoft to create the Be a Martian program. (It’s unfortunate that Microsoft Silverlight is required for anything on the site to work, but whatever.) Users play “games” that require them to sift through…
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Top Ten Ways to Destroy the Earth
Just in case you need a project this weekend, Live Science has done a roundup of ten ways to obliterate the planet. Each method includes a handy inventory of the supplies you need, so you can make up your shopping list. Gobbled up by strangelets You will need: a stable strangelet Method: Hijack control of…
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This is Either Awesome News…
…or an enormous scam. Deciding which is left as an exercise for the reader. Claiming a huge injection of funds (like, $3 billion) from an anonymous benefactor, a Barcelona-based company called Galactic Suite, Ltd. is touting their plan to have a functioning space hotel in orbit by 2012. A three-night stay will cost $4.4 million),…
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Strange Moments in Spaceflight
MSNBC.com has an amusing roundup of space mission oddities such as launch delays caused by alligators and bats stowing away on the shuttle. Link (via Quarkscrew)
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NASA Humor
As is common for NASA missions these days, the LCROSS satellite broadcast a live Twitter feed as it headed toward the Moon. It makes me deeply, viscerally happy to report that just before it smacked into the lunar surface its last tweets were the whale bit from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Wow, 150km…
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50 Years of Space Missions
National Geographic’s current Map of the Day is a zoomable, movable image of our missions throughout the solar system. It is kind of awesome. Link (via Cognitive Dissident)