News and Commentary on Space
This is the same video the rental agency in Iceland made us watch before they would hand over the keys.
If driver’s education here were as graphic as the segment on seatbelts at 4:38, I’m guessing we’d have a lot fewer traffic deaths.
Three weeks in Iceland, as seen by my GPS unit:
Now that I have a little bit more time available, I’ve been working again on the time-lapse videos from the Iceland trip last July. Have largely given up on ever getting the bumpy spots satisfactorily “deshaken” with the software tools available, but I did discover something that I completely missed at the time and in the first attempt to render out the video — a white rainbow:
Oddly enough, we did see a white rainbow that day, down on the beach about a half hour after the still frame above was taken:
So, not only did we see a strange phenomenon for the first time that day, but twice (arguably, since I didn’t actually see it while driving).
The University of Arizona has posted an interesting new batch of images from HiRISE, taken between July 8-31 this year. Wired, in its writeup on the Mars image collection, includes a sample image that looks sorta…familiar…
These volcanic cones were formed by hot lava running over water or ice. The heat from the lava boiled the water underneath, and the water burst upwards in an exploding bubble of lava. The explosion threw chunks of molten and solid lava into the air to gather into the cones. These cones are similar in size and shape to cones found in Iceland.
Probably because last month I saw some of the craters in Iceland referred to in the Wired article:
It’s a little hard to appreciate them from this angle – short of renting a plane or climbing the Gibraltar-like pinnacle in the middle of the lake, there wasn’t a good vantage point from which to capture on film the features you could see with your eyes (well, okay, there sorta was, but I didn’t have my long zoom lens on the trip).
As I recall, the Mars Society was at one time considering establishing one of their analogue stations in Iceland. One could certainly choose far less Mars-similar locations…
[via Instapundit]
I’ve always thought that NASA’s manned rover concepts were a little too consciously “futuristic”, designed more with a sci-fi aesthetic in mind than simple rugged practicality.
Now this…this is my idea of a manned rover…
The clouds and greenery (such as it is) distract from the impression here, but the geothermal taps at Krafla struck me as looking a lot like the infrastructure one might expect to see near a settlement on the Moon or Mars. The offworld resemblance wasn’t only in the incompletely-terraformed appearance of the landscape.
A slightly-marsified version of one of my Iceland pics, from the wastelands near Emstrur.
It was easy to see why NASA sent Apollo astronauts to train here.
Finally getting the time to post more of my Iceland pictures on Flickr. Aside from the clouds and the sparse moss, one could picture a vista like this on Mars:
As I upload the pictures, I’m also adding any especially un-Earth-like shots to a separate set which I will publish here later. The set will include some shots I got of various geothermal installations, which (like the landscapes) look an awful lot like what I would expect some of the industrial parts of a Mars settlement to look like.
I really, really should have visited Iceland before we started writing a novel set on Mars. If Texas is like a whole other country, Iceland is like a whole other not-quite-fully-terraformed planet.
Finally back in Reykjavik after a week’s trek through the hinterlands north of Eyjafjallajokull and two weeks of camping throughout the rest of the country. I’ll have more Mars-related material over the next couple of weeks, as I sort through about 24GB of photographs and 48GB or more of HD video.
One of the local newspapers, Morgunblaðið, has some good video of the eruption at Eyjafjallajokull, taken apparently from the nearby Fimmvörðuháls Pass.
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A young girl sets out to prove herself by resolving a long-forgotten mystery. But when she gets close to the truth, what she thought was a harmless adventure becomes a threat to the future of the independent commercial settlements on Mars.
