Mariner 4 was the first successful flyby of Mars. On this day in 1965, it made its closest approach and sent the first closeup images of the surface. These were also the first closeup images ever returned of another planet.
Learning from falling
“Part of the reason for the clumsiness is that, while you might weigh less on the Moon, your mass stays the same – and therefore inertia, which is a body’s resistance to changes in motion and is related to mass, not weight, also stays the same.”
ScienceAlert First Man
A biopic of Neil Armstrong is coming in October, called “First Man”. It looks like the creative team is doing everything right. This could be really good.
“Jim and I have been spending a lot of time putting together an annotated script,” said Singer. “This is a book that will be published with the movie, and not only will it showcase beautiful stills from the film, which does look gorgeous, but beyond that we want to be very clear about what we fictionalized and when we diverged why it was we made that choice.”
Regarding Opportunity
The Opportunity rover has been quiet since this dust storm began. In this video, researchers discuss just how amazingly successful Opportunity has been.
Sample return
“But why go to all this trouble?”
Didn’t Mallory already answer questions like this back in 1923?
The Planetary Society Dust storm animation
Here’s a cool animation showing the extent of the dust storm happening on Mars right now.
“The future is a DIY project”
“Should I honor my half-century on Earth by buying a convertible or by building my own satellite to launch into space?”
We have an obligation
“Colonizing other planets will be a multicentury effort. Nobody alive today will see the end of this project. But, in a way, that’s really cool. It forces us to be farsighted, to take the long view.”
A short article that includes a longer podcast. Both are worth the time.
The Atlantic Dust storm
The dust storm on Mars is a global weather event.
“The last dust storm on Mars to go global occurred in 2007, five years before the Curiosity rover landed at its Gale Crater site, according to officials with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.”
Family vacation
Posts have been a little thin here lately, I know. I’ve been away for a while on family vacation. We loaded up the car and set off on a camping roadtrip to explore a bunch of National Parks. It was the longest trip we’ve taken in terms of both miles driven and nights spent in sleeping bags. On the whole, it was a great trip full of memorable moments and family bonding.
Since our return, I’ve been thinking about the fact that families on Mars will never experience this. Not only will there not be family roadtrips and camping. There won’t be traveling vacations at all. Where would they go?
This has left me feeling a little blue. It seems a hard life for a family. Things like this often bother me, as I develop this series. The lives of these kids and their family will be so different than those of mine, it can be a little overwhelming to contemplate.
Of course the whole series pivots on identifying and exploring these differences. And my feeling of pity at what I imagine to be something they’d miss is culture-centric. We all feel that our experience is the norm and that of others is aberrant. Their lives will be full of memorable moments and family bonding, no car or sleeping bags required.
Still, it could be interesting to come up with a way they take a roadtrip together. Have to think about that a bit…
In the meantime, I’ll work on making things more interesting around here.