Phil Plait has a video NASA put out re how they’re going to land the nearly one tonne of Curiosity on Mars.
It’s… impressive. We start out with a heat shield and some aerobraking in the thin Martian atmosphere…
Then the chute. A really freaking big supersonic chute…
Then the rockets, starting with a snazzy maneuver to fly out from under the chute…
Then there’s this sky crane deal beneath the rockets…
Then the descent stage bit full o’ rockets detaches from the rover, and buggers off in high style by flying off into the wild blue-or-possibly-kinda-reddish yonder…
… all automated, natch, with the computer using radar to finesse the last bits and arrange for the thing to touch down properly where the crust actually happens to be, since it takes 7 minutes to land, and the radio round trip back to mission control would be like 28 minutes.
No, I’m not kidding. That’s really what they’re gonna do. Go. Watch.
Question: does it somehow help if I say out loud, bad TV-writing style: ‘It’s just crazy enough to work’?
It’s… impressive. We start out with a heat shield and some aerobraking in the thin Martian atmosphere…
Then the chute. A really freaking big supersonic chute…
Then the rockets, starting with a snazzy maneuver to fly out from under the chute…
Then there’s this sky crane deal beneath the rockets…
Then the descent stage bit full o’ rockets detaches from the rover, and buggers off in high style by flying off into the wild blue-or-possibly-kinda-reddish yonder…
… all automated, natch, with the computer using radar to finesse the last bits and arrange for the thing to touch down properly where the crust actually happens to be, since it takes 7 minutes to land, and the radio round trip back to mission control would be like 28 minutes.
No, I’m not kidding. That’s really what they’re gonna do. Go. Watch.
Question: does it somehow help if I say out loud, bad TV-writing style: ‘It’s just crazy enough to work’?
21/06: Superearths vs. subneptunes
John Matson at Scientific American has commentary on preliminary results attempting to narrow down at what diameter a planet larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune is likely to be more like the former or the latter. Answer so far: at somewhere between one and two Earth radii and below, you get a terrestrial; above, and it’s more likely to be an ice giant.
… Meanwhile, for reference, and as a ‘you are here’ moment, The Exoplanet Encyclopaedia now lists 778 confirmed exoplanets, and the Kepler candidate list is now at 2321. Our universe is getting a lot more interesting, and rapidly.
… Meanwhile, for reference, and as a ‘you are here’ moment, The Exoplanet Encyclopaedia now lists 778 confirmed exoplanets, and the Kepler candidate list is now at 2321. Our universe is getting a lot more interesting, and rapidly.
06/06: Venus' presence
So I did see the transit yesterday. Had been planning on dragging the kids out to the scopes at the science and technology museum, but on stepping outside toward doing so, saw a neighbour had set up his refractor—kitted out with a solar filter—on the sidewalk.
So I strolled over, asked nicely, and I and the kids saw it there, instead, which was much more convenient.
It’s very neat seeing the disk of Venus that way. It’s funny how much more it seems to make it a real object—and never mind that it’s visible as a slightly more than starlike point quite regularly, and never mind there’s countless photos available now from various ground and space telescopes and from robotic craft that even went so far as to land on the thing. Seeing with your own eyes through the eyepiece that actually-not-so-little very round disk in front of the substantially larger disk of the sun, Venus suddenly seems that much more solid and that much nearer—a real thing, a real place. A planetary neighbour swinging by real close and showing up in stark silhouette.
We weren’t the only ones nearby stopping to look, either. Walking later over to the pharmacy, I met a guy who was using his binoculars to project the image onto a sheet of paper—which he reported was also working fairly well.
So I strolled over, asked nicely, and I and the kids saw it there, instead, which was much more convenient.
It’s very neat seeing the disk of Venus that way. It’s funny how much more it seems to make it a real object—and never mind that it’s visible as a slightly more than starlike point quite regularly, and never mind there’s countless photos available now from various ground and space telescopes and from robotic craft that even went so far as to land on the thing. Seeing with your own eyes through the eyepiece that actually-not-so-little very round disk in front of the substantially larger disk of the sun, Venus suddenly seems that much more solid and that much nearer—a real thing, a real place. A planetary neighbour swinging by real close and showing up in stark silhouette.
We weren’t the only ones nearby stopping to look, either. Walking later over to the pharmacy, I met a guy who was using his binoculars to project the image onto a sheet of paper—which he reported was also working fairly well.
