MarsBlog - Part 15

KeithWatch

The Keith’s Night graphic is the best part.

Messenger’s First Pic from Mercury

And it looks a bit like the lunar farside:

NASA’s Messenger spacecraft snapped the new Mercury photo today (March 29) at 5:20 a.m. EDT (0920 GMT). The photo shows the stark gray landscape of southern Mercury, a view that is dominated by a huge impact crater. [See the first photo of Mercury from orbit]

“This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the solar system’s innermost planet,” Messenger mission scientists explained in a statement.

The new Mercury photo shows a region around the south pole of Mercury. A 53-mile (85-kilometer) wide crater called Debussy clearly stands out in the upper right of the image, with bright rays emanating from its center. [More photos of Mercury from Messenger]

A smaller crater called Matabei, which is 15 miles (24 km) wide and is known for its “unusual dark rays,” is also visible in the image to the west of the Debussy crater, mission managers explained.

Fukushima Accident Explained…via Poop Joke

It’s juvenile, but still pretty informative.

[hat tip: Gina]

Fukushima Reactors – Background Reading

The design of the Fukushima reactors (currently experiencing some…er…problems due to the combined effects of the earthquake and tsunami) is detailed in this helpful backgrounder from the NRC: Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Systems [pdf]

I knew a good bit of the science of what went on inside the different types of nuclear reactors, but this document provides a good bit of hardware insight (to an engineer at least) of how the containment and emergency systems are designed.

For comparison, here is the backgrounder on Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR), which the larger part of our 104 active nuclear power plants use.

Feeding Martians

An interesting project at the South Pole, involving agriculture in a controlled (and in this case, sunless and soil-less) environment: To the moon…South Pole greenhouse model for growing freshies on other worlds

Crops of lettuce, kale, cucumber, peppers, herbs, tomatoes, cantaloupes and edible flowers comprise many of the plants grown in the climate-controlled chamber. Because the importation of soil is restricted by the Antarctic Treaty , dirt is not used to grow the plants. In fact, the closest local dirt is nearly two miles beneath the ice on which the station sits. The plants are grown in a hydroponic nutrient solution instead — no dirt needed.

For that matter, no sunlight is needed either. The growth chamber, which was built in the winter of 2004, makes its own light via 13 water-cooled, high-pressure sodium lamps. In this bright environment, it is not uncommon to find people, like the plants, dwelling happily under the intense light produced in the chamber during the dark polar winter.

Carl and I put a lot of thought into extraterrestrial agriculture while writing In the Shadow of Ares, not least because the primary setting for the book is a very large agricultural settlement. Interestingly (or perhaps not surprisingly), we came to some of the same conclusions as these researchers. Of particular note, the morale benefit to settlers in an inescapably indoor environment of having an open green space (or Greenspace, if you’ve read the book).

Teaching Citizen Journalism

Spending the morning at Independence Institute with a group of bloggers and pro-liberty activists from Kyrgyzstan, sharing People’s Press Collective’s citizen journalism experience.

A really interesting collection of bloggers, including the director of the only free-market think-tank in Central Asia.

Why You Should Attend the LPR Annual Retreat

It gets better and bigger every year…

Dirk Gently on BBC

Looks…interesting. Hope it turns out better than Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy did.

Atlas Shrugged Trailer

This would make a great drinking game at your next Objectivist book club meeting: spot the deviations from the book!

I guess one has to expect many differences from the source material, given that the producers don’t have a Lord of the Rings-scale budget with which to depict the “period” setting of the book — regrettably, since the “yesterday’s world of tomorrow” flavor of the book would have made for some noir/Deco/raygun gothic eye candy. The question is how well they’ve handled these differences and how consistent the differences are with the overall themes of the book — do the movies still tell the same fundamental story?

I am concerned a bit with the acting, though. It could be that the scenes shown just don’t match the urgent mood of the music used in the trailer, but the actors (particularly the one playing Dagny Taggart) seem a little too subdued for the lines they are speaking given the scenes in the book from which those lines are taken.

As for props, the one glimpse of the Rearden Metal bridge is intriguing (that has to be the single hardest object from the book to visualize, based on Rand’s description). On the other hand, the “device” from Starnesville looked pretty close to what I expected except for size — in the book, Dagny and Hank have to struggle to free it from the junk pile, and it is later shown wrapped in a tarp in Hank’s trunk. I guess I was expecting something about the size of a car’s engine block, but perhaps something the size of a coffee pot is actually more reasonable given that the device is an early engineering prototype.

Apollo I

I missed the anniversary last week due to other time commitments, but here’s a suitably ethereal shot of the “monument” at Cape Canaveral’s LC-34:

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