The terror is over. Our first 256×256 snapshot of the surface of Mars after the utterly terrifying touchdown sequence.
Eight years to plan and build this rover that’s bigger than your car and taller than you.
36 weeks of travel across 562 million kilometres of space travel.
And it missed its mark by a mere couple hundred metres.
Science rules.
Heard on the live NASA TV stream: “Holy shit!” I concur, good sir. I concur.
Atlantic Daylight Time, of course. So 05:31 UTC.
Remember Curiosity and its Rube Goldberg-like planned landing? That happens tonight. Tomorrow morning, technically, for some of us. Phil Plait has details on how to participate in the fun:
If you want to watch the proceedings live, I have a few things you can do.
1) Fraser Cain, Pamela Gay, and I will be doing a Google+ Hangout on August 5th starting at 03:00 UTC on August 5/6 and running until 07:00 – note that for the US, this starts on the evening of the 5th at 23:00 Eastern time and runs through 03:00 in the morning. We plan on having special guests, a live feed from NASA, and more. The Hangout is being sponsored by Google itself, CosmoQuest, and the SETI Institute, which has a strong astrobiology mission and therefore is very interested in Mars. Our coverage will be complete, intense, awesome, and fun. Promise! There’s more info at Universe Today, and we have an events page set up on G+ to help you out. There’s also a Facebook events page, too! Use the #marshangout hashtag on Twitter to follow along, too.
2) You can always watch NASA TV. They’ve posted a schedule of events for media.
3) If you are in the Pasadena California area, then join the party! Literally: The Planetary Society is throwing a bash to celebrate
and watchthe landing at the Paseo Colorado – Garfield Promenade on Saturday, August 4. Attending will be TPS blogger (and big pal o’ mine) Emily Lakdawalla as well as Bill Nye (yes, THE Bill Nye). You can get more info on Emily’s blog, and get tickets online. If I could, I’d go there too! But I’ll be at home and quite busy myself (see #1 above).4) The Planetary Society is holding PlanetFest at the Pasadena Convention Center on August 4 and 5 – it’s again a celebration of planetary exploration. It looks like fun!
X-Box 360 users will also be able to live-stream the landing. My sleep schedule has been completely screwed by work for a very long time, so I’m planning on staying up myself. I’m trying to figure out if the PS3 browser can handle Ustream, but I’m not having a lot of luck with it myself. Anyone know of a good way to stream to PS3, given that’s my primary media centre?
Surprise surprise.
A report by the Families and Work Institute has clued into the fact that men are still pressured by society’s rigid gender roles to be the primary breadwinner even while being primary caregiver.
Even though many women work and contribute to the family income, the report says that “men have retained the ‘traditional Male Mystique’–the pressure to be the primary financial providers for their families.” At the same time, they don’t want to be the distant dads of the 1950s.
“Men today view the ‘ideal’ man as someone who is not only successful as a financial provider, but is also involved as a father, husband-partner and son. Yet flat earnings, long hours, increasing job demands, blurred boundaries between work and home life and declining job security all contribute to the pressures men face to succeed at work and at home and thus to work-family conflict,” said the report.
Continue reading “Rigid gender roles hurt men in the workplace”
Canadian scientists marched on Parliament Hill this past Tuesday to protest the ongoing campaign by the Harper government to squelch any and all science whose results go against party lines on topics like (and especially) the environment.
Evoking images of the Grim Reaper, protesters held a mock funeral procession through the streets of Ottawa before ending up at the House of Commons.
They chanted: No Science, No Evidence, No Truth, No Democracy.
Continue reading “Scientists protest death of evidence on Parliament Hill”
One of the most painful lessons I’ve learned over the past several months is that there are no heroes. There is always — always — some measure, small or large, of disappointment hiding behind all the awesome things that drew you to idolize one person or another.
Of course, while I always thought of Dawkins as a science popularizer and atheist first, and a humanist dead last, I figured this latest Great Sorting of the skeptical and atheist communities into those that are down with social justice causes and those that would rather entrench themselves in privilege would pretty much end exactly this way. The hyper-privileged folks nearest the top of our movement have pretty uniformly fallen on one side of this divide — the side that would rather not skeptically examine ideas like social conventions, consent, harassment policies and protecting the underprivileged.
So it’s absolutely no surprise to me that Dawkins has, again, sided against Skepchick — this time, instead of writing a “Dear Muslima” comment at Rebecca Watson (telling her that the sexism she encounters isn’t nearly as bad as female genital mutilation, so she should grow up or get a thicker skin), he’s stabbing at Skepchick the organization for a) being on board with the idea of harassment policies, and b) for having written a post last year offering free vaccinations with hugs as your reward.
Continue reading “Dawkins stabs at Skepchick over “Hug Me I’m Vaccinated” campaign”
Another of the three panels I was on, audio only unfortunately. Do let me know if the questions from the audience aren’t audible, I might be able to normalize the volume some. I’m not terribly experienced with Audacity, but I’m willing to play with it some more if you have problems.
Also on the panel were biologist and medium-calibre blogger PZ Myers, sci-fi author Adam Whitlatch, math professor and zombie afficionado Robert Smith? (yes, the question mark is part of his real name), and The Skeptical Teacher Matt Lowry (who tried to bite PZ’s head and whapped me about with a CONvergence schedule — I’m just saying).
Continue reading “CONvergence: Doomsday Scenarios”
Ohhhh, this is just too damn cool. I had no idea Curiosity was so kitted out!
On its way to the Gale Crater, right now, is NASA’s Curiosity rover, the most sophisticated robot in the history of space science: a dune buggy equipped with a set of tools and instruments to shame Inspector Gadget. Curiosity can vaporize rock, analyze soil samples, gauge the weather, and film in HD. It’s due to touch down in the Gale Crater on August 5, completing an eight-month journey through the local solar system. Once it lands, the rover will begin a slow ascent up Aeolis Mons, the mountain in the crater’s center, probing its layers for signs that Mars once supported life. It will also collect new data about the surface of Mars, which NASA will use to determine the feasibility of future manned missions there.
A few weeks ago I visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to talk with Michael Mischna, a planetary scientist who works on the Curiosity team. What follows is our conversation about Curiosity’s mind-blowing technologies and what those technologies might tell us about the history of Mars.
Think about what we’re actually doing this for: to find water on Mars. To find, potentially, evidence that life once existed — or exists now — on Mars. Because we’re CURIOUS.
Of course, first it’ll have to survive seven minutes of terror:
This is ambitious. This is crazy. This is the sort of thing science alone can achieve.
According to The Atlantic Wire, San Diego’s entire 18 minute show got compressed (via time dilation, rogue Hobbits, or a misfire — we may never know!) into a mere 15 seconds.
I put it to you dear readers: worst, or best?
The last Galapagos tortoise, Lonesome George, has died at roughly a hundred years old. Scientists aren’t sure why he died and plan an autopsy, but Galapagos tortoises were thought to have a lifespan of about two hundred years.
George was a member of the same species of tortoise that prompted Charles Darwin, on visiting the Galapagos Islands, to first formulate the theory of evolution.
The footage of George in this clip starts at 2:03, but you may want to watch the start anyway, which tells of fishermen holding George and other iconic animals hostage to fend off conservationists who have been making the fishermen’s lives difficult.
… And what’s stopping it from doing so: mostly, the magnetosphere.
According to Frazer Cain of Universe Today, this is part of a larger video playing at the Smithsonian called Dynamic Earth: Exploring Earth’s Climate Engine.
I’d love to see the full video, if this snippet is any indication.
