Apollo
cevans | August 26, 2012Yesterday we lost Neil Armstrong, an accidental hero, thrust by fate onto a rock in the sky. Many dreamt of walking on the moon before he did, and a few men did after him. He happened to be the first. Hopefully many more men, and women too, will echo his iconic footsteps in the future. Perhaps even future space tourists will huddle around Tranquility base, laying nostalgic 60s filters over their high-resolution snapshots of an upended American flag from a long-ago mission.
We can only hope. A lot of my favorite humans have died this year: Armstrong, Sally Ride, Ray Bradbury, all people who…
esiegel | August 25, 2012"Geologists have a saying: rocks remember." -Neil Armstrong
Looming up above us, hundreds of thousands of miles away, is the largest moon in the inner solar system: our Moon.
Image credit: © 2004 by Ulli and Christian 'Pete' Lotzmann.
One of the greatest achievements in the history of our planet culminated on July 20th, 1969, when the first creatures from our world set foot on the Moon, becoming -- as far as we know -- the first creatures to ever willingly leave their own world and land on another.
Image credit: NASA, of Neil Armstrong's descent towards the lunar surface.
The honor of the…
esiegel | August 7, 2012"I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope." -Albert Schweitzer
As you all know, the most ambitious interplanetary mission ever attempted -- Mars Science Laboratory -- successfully landed its Curiosity rover on Mars earlier this week. Last night, I had the opportunity to go on my local news and speak a bit about it, and as always, it was an absolute pleasure.
(Video credit: KGW / Ben Lacy / Carey Higgins / Steph Stricklen.)
Of course we got to talk about the rover itself and its science potential, and exactly how much more sophisticated it is than any of its martian…
esiegel | July 20, 2012"The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream." -Buzz Aldrin
43 years ago today, humanity took our first steps on another world, venturing nearly 400,000 kilometers from home and walking on the surface of the Moon.
Image credit: NASA, Apollo 11, photo by Neil Armstrong.
Of course, what we found there was a world whose soil was very similar to our own, but devoid of any atmosphere, liquid, or signs of life, present or past. But out beyond the Moon, visible in the distance even when viewed from Earth,…
cevans | September 13, 2011A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O'Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the "Overview Effect," a phrase coined by the writer Frank White to describe the profound insight -- characterized by a sudden awareness of life's interconnectedness and the frailty of our planet -- experienced by astronauts gazing down at the Earth from space.
Frank White is the author of The Overview Effect: Space…
cevans | December 13, 2010
We live in an age where truth is, if not stranger than fiction, then at least equally strange. Sometimes pop-science books illustrate this point with particular well-researched glee and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void is such a book.
Where do I begin? It's a true nerd's smorgasbord. It answers all the scatological and emotional questions that kids always imprudently ask astronauts. It acknowledges the humanness of space travel as a venture: that astronauts are people who must eat, pass gas, have sex, take up space, sweat, sleep, fear, and otherwise learn to be…
razib | July 19, 2009Moon astronauts urge Mars mission:
At a rare public reunion of the Apollo 11 crew, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins said Mars instead of the Moon should be the focus of exploration.
Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, said the race to get to the Moon had been the ultimate peaceful contest.
He said it was an "exceptional national investment" for the US and ex-USSR.
The trio spoke at an event at Washington's National Air and Space Museum to mark the 40th anniversary of their mission.
Mr Armstrong told the audience: "It was the ultimate peaceful competition: USA vs USSR.
Apparently 4 out…
esiegel | April 22, 2008As you may have noticed from yesterday's unusual post, today is Earth Day! I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite pictures from space of it, including the famous photograph from Apollo 8 known as Earthrise:
This combination shot made from NASA’s Terra satellite and NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite:
The known satellites at least 0.1 meters in size in orbit around Earth (there are ~11,000 of them as of April 2005, and another 100,000 between 1 cm and 10 cm in size):
Looking at the Earth and the docked Space Shuttle from the International Space Station:
And…