(Photo; Jeremy Liebman; Dwell)
Saturday, August 07, 2010
A Place in History
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this full 360-degree view of the rover's surroundings after a drive on the 2,220th Martian day, or sol, of its mission (April 22, 2010).
Opportunity launched on July 7, 2003, on a mission slated to last 90 days, landing on Mars in January 2004. The rover has exceeded its mission parameters by more than 2,200 days as its exploration of the Red Planet continues.
Opportunity took some of the component images for this mosaic on Sol 2220, after the drive, and the rest on Sol 2221. Wind-formed ripples of dark sand make up much of the terrain surrounding this position. Patches of outcrop are visible to the south. For scale, the distance between the parallel wheel tracks is about 1 meter (about 40 inches).
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Slingshot
There are two possible explanations for this 'slingshot' in space: kickback by a triple black hole system, or the effects of gravitational waves produced after two supermassive black holes merged a few million years earlier.
The discovery of this object comes from a large, multi-wavelength survey, known as the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS). This survey includes data from Chandra, HST, XMM- Newton, as well as ground-based observatories. Of the 2,600 X-ray sources found in COSMOS, only one -- named CID-42 and located in a galaxy about 3.9 billion light years away -- coincides with two very close, compact optical sources.
Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/F.Civano et al. Optical: NASA/STScI
Red Panda Mom Shows Her Skills at Chester Zoo
Red Panda Mom Shows Her Skills at Chester Zoo: "
"
New photos by David Evans from the UK's Chester Zoo reveal just how agile a Red Panda mom has to be. Mom has a tight grip on her tiny cub as she navigates the veritable obstacle course that is the red panda cub enclosure. Expert climbers, Red Pandas are catlike in many of their behaviors including grooming, lying outstretched when it's hot, and curling up with tails over their snouts in colder weather.
Photo Credits: David Evans
Poem of the week
Schubertiad by Fiona Sampson
After the String Quintet in C, D956
One moment before it starts –
one breath.
Light stills
in the meadow,
stalls at oaks
and the river's silver line.
For an instant
your stomach turns over –
as if you missed yourself
and this minute
and the next
were already a memory.
*
Sometimes,
world slips from beat to beat
like a song.
The afternoon fills
with lokum's evasive scent,
deep notes of cherry,
and there are saucers of honey
and peaches and a girl
who leans on a cushion to sing –
Open your notebook,
catch
how she throws out the tune
as if she tongued
a rose
between her lips –
*
Wanderer, the wide river
shines in the morning sun.
Between the country and the city -
see it run.
You'd like to run with it
to a quiet place, in fields
time and sickness never visit
and joy shields.
Too soon the flood and battened sluice,
the detritus of a life
that's been turned adrift
on this tide
which now seems beautiful and bright:
the river's backdrop to the kiss
you borrowed from daylight
and bring to Dis.
*
Waiting (stateliest of the modes)
among Greek key, acanthus,
shuttered glass
and the light snagged in stucco –
where each façade rises
in stillness
and stone grows
infinitesimally –
you feel a creak and strain:
spring ice
yawing on its tethers.
You poor soul.
Without summer's garlands and girls
you're quite bare,
bespectacled and alone
in that soiled bed.
Monday, August 02, 2010
Ghostly Encounter
The surface of Saturn's moon Dione is rendered in crisp detail against a hazy, ghostly Titan. Visible in this image are hints of atmospheric banding around Titan's north pole.
The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 10, 2010. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Dione and 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Titan. Scale in the original image was 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel on Dione and 16 kilometers (10 miles) on Titan. The image has been magnified by a factor of 1.5 and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Supersonic Green Machine
This future aircraft design concept for supersonic flight over land comes from the team led by the Lockheed Martin Corporation.
The team's simulation shows possibility for achieving overland flight by dramatically lowering the level of sonic booms through the use of an "inverted-V" engine-under wing configuration. Other revolutionary technologies help achieve range, payload and environmental goals.
This concept is one of two designs presented in April 2010 to the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate for its NASA Research Announcement-funded studies into advanced supersonic cruise aircraft that could enter service in the 2030-2035 timeframe.
Image credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin Corporation
Me about to divorce
Going to meet my bastard (imagine scottish accent here) husband. Very confused and a bit scared of what happens next. Here is some nice music to make me feel better.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Poem of the week
The Candle by Katherine Mansfield
By my bed, on a little round table,
By my bed, on a little round table,
The Grandmother placed a candle.
She gave me three kisses telling me they were three dreams
And tucked me in just where I loved being tucked.
Then she went out of the room and the door was shut.
I lay still, waiting for my three dreams to talk;
But they were silent.
Suddenly I remembered giving her three kisses back.
Perhaps, by mistake, I had given my three little dreams.
I sat up in bed.
The room grew big, oh, bigger far than a church.
The wardrobe, quite by itself, as big as a house.
And the jug on the washstand smiled at me:
It was not a friendly smile.
I looked at the basket-chair where my clothes lay folded:
The chair gave a creak as though it were listening for something.
Perhaps it was coming alive and going to dress in my clothes.
But the awful thing was the window:
I could not think what was outside.
No tree to be seen, I was sure,
No nice little plant or friendly pebbly path.
Why did she pull the blind down every night?
It was better to know.
I crunched my teeth and crept out of bed.
I peeped through a slit of blind.
There was nothing at all to be seen
But hundreds of friendly candles all over the sky
In remembrance of frightened children.
I went back to bed …
The three dreams started singing a little song.
A Matter of Perspective
The Seagull nebula, seen in this infrared mosaic from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, draws its common name from it resemblance to a gull in flight. But it depends on your point of view. When the image is rotated 180 degrees it bears a passing resemblance to a galloping lizard -- or perhaps a dragon or a dinosaur. The image spans an area about seven times as wide as the full moon, and three times as high (3.55 by 1.37 degrees), straddling the border between the constellations Monoceros and Canis Major (the Big Dog). So you might say this lizard is running with the Big Dog, while the gull is flying from it.
Astronomers catalog the nebula as IC 2177. This cosmic cloud is one of many sites of star formation within the Milky Way galaxy. It is located 3,800 light-years away from Earth, inside the Orion spur -- the same partial spiral arm of the Milky Way where our solar system is located. The nebula is nearly 240 light-years across.
WISE is an all-sky survey, snapping pictures of the whole sky -- from asteroids to stars to powerful, distant galaxies.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
A Light in the Sky
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa spacecraft streaked across the sky like a saber of light through the clouds as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Woomera Test Range in Australia. In Kingoonya, the spacecraft’s re-entry was visible to the human eye for only 15 seconds. Image Credit: NASA/Ed Schilling
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