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If James Cameron is so passionate about restoring the 3D camera to MSL/Curiosity, then…instead of lobbying, and urging, and taking his concerns to the NASA administrator, why didn’t he just pay for it out of pocket?
I don’t know that he didn’t, or didn’t offer to do so (the article doesn’t say), but it seems like the obvious thing to do for a guy with a passion and a couple billion dollars in the bank. Indeed, a sponsorship arrangement with NASA would have been a coup for both. Trade Cameron the rights to market the resulting imagery in exchange for underwriting the camera, let him produce a theatrical 3D documentary using it, and both win: Cameron cleans up at the box office, and NASA gets a great PR and education/information outreach opportunity.
In Florida today to watch the STS-131 launch, which went off without a hitch this morning. More later, but I need a nap, and then I have to drive back to Orlando for the return flight to Denver. Video now added below (at least, one little clip – I’ll try to add more later).
Space enthusiast Robert Harrison managed to send his home-made contraption 22 miles – or 116,160 feet – above the earth’s surface from his back garden.
He used GPS tracking technology similar to an in-car sat-nav to follow its progress – and an attached radio transmitter to find it when it parachutes back to earth.
The photos taken by his device were so spectacular that Nasa has been in touch to see how he achieved it.
Mr Harrison’s budget of £500 might also offer inspiration to the new UK Space Agency, which launches on April 1. Based in Swindon, with only one astronaut and a budget one 50th the size of Nasa’s, it will be looking for cut-price ways to reach for the sky.
Mr Harrison first got the idea to explore space after a failed attempt to take aerial pictures of his house using a remote control helicopter.
The pictures are pretty impressive. What’s really amazing about this, though, is that he didn’t get nailed by the aviation authorities for doing this. Or that the police didn’t arrest him under the 2004 Terrorist Act for “suspicious” or “antisocial” photography.
Minerals on Mars studied by the NASA rovers suggest water once flowed on the planet’s surface, but was very salty and acidic, raising doubts about whether it could have supported life.
But in 2007, Melanie Mormile of Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla and colleagues cultured a bacterium from water sampled from one of several salty, acidic lakes in Western Australia.
The lakes are very shallow and periodically fill with rainwater before partially evaporating, which concentrates the salts within them. They may be the closest equivalents on Earth of the shallow pools thought to have once dotted Mars.
Which leaves me to wonder if there aren’t pockets of salty, acidic water remaining underground on Mars, warmed by residual internal heat from the planet, where such microbes might have migrated from the surface as conditions there grew (even) less hospitable.
The new system, which NASA uploaded over the past few months, is called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or AEGIS and it lets Opportunity’s computer examine images that the rover takes with its wide-angle navigation camera after a drive, and recognize rocks that meet specified criteria, such as rounded shape or light color. It can then center its narrower-angle panoramic camera on the chosen target and take multiple images through color filters, NASA stated.
AEGIS lets Opportunity look at rocks at stopping points along a single day’s drive or at the end of the day’s drive. This lets it identify and examine targets of interest that might otherwise be missed, NASA said.
NASA said the first images taken by the Mars rover choosing its own target show a rock about the size of a football, tan in color and layered in texture. It appears to be one of the rocks tossed outward onto the surface when an impact dug a nearby crater. Opportunity pointed its panoramic camera at this unnamed rock after analyzing a wider-angle photo taken by the rover’s navigation camera at the end of a drive on March 4. Opportunity decided that this particular rock, out of more than 50 in the navigation camera photo, best met the criteria that researchers had set for a target of interest: large and dark, NASA stated.
Cool. But while it increases the productivity of this and future rovers, it isn’t going to eliminate the utility of sending humans to explore – or their essential role in settlement which, by definition, is not something robots have the ability to do.
I’m curious as to where the developers at NASA plan to take this technology in the future. Will evolved versions allow for (for instance) faster-moving rovers capable of covering more ground instead of waiting for detailed instructions? How much serendipity or “curiosity” will be allowed in the programming – that is, how broad will the selection criteria be, how much autonomy will future rovers have to pursue their own selections, and will the process be recursive, allowing the rover to reevaluate and select new science targets based on unexpected discoveries at a previously-selected target? Imagine a fleet of small, fast, simple, mass-produced rovers with loose guidlines and broad autonomy, scattered over the surface of Mars and allowed to wander at will, subject to occasional nudges from controllers back on Earth towards features of interest.
…if there’s something going on, geologically, with all these earthquakes lately. And now, a volcanic eruption in Iceland to add to the list:
Scientists are flying over southern Iceland to evaluate whether it’s safe for people to return to their homes after a volcanic eruption. Saturday night’s eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano — which is located near a glacier of the same name — shot ash and molten lava into the air and forced nearly 500 people to evacuate their homes.
The Telegraph link above has a gallery with some great pictures of the volcano and surrounding area (be sure to check out the volcanic smoke ring in image #9). Oddly enough, I just made a reservation for a hike near that area in July, and decided against the two day extension that would have taken us over the mountain pass east of the glacier (and quite near the volcano, as I understand it). Lucky choice, as it turned out.
On the other hand, Iceland is rich in geological “Oh crap!” possibilities, and just about everything we plan to see there is in some manner susceptible to sudden volcanic or tectonic cataclysm. Which of course makes it all the more enticing.
