The Asteroid Project

I just love this picture.

A bit of a Saganfest.

(Source: bouncingdodecahedrons)

May Gibbs’ “Snugglepot and Cuddlepie” used to scare me as a child. There was always something creepy about the look of shock on their faces. No wonder: they’re tiny, naked, and stuck inside acorns.

The good thing about them is they remind me of my beloved grandmother, Agnes Hamilton (1909 - 1987), who passed on 25 years ago this month. She had a copy of this book (pictured).

the-star-stuff:

NASA’s 10 Greatest Science Missions

10. Pioneer

Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, were the first spacecraft to visit the solar system’s most photogenic gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Pioneer 10 was the first probe to travel through the solar system’s asteroid belt, a field of orbiting rocks between Mars and Jupiter. 

9. Voyager

Shortly after the Pioneers made their flybys, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes followed. They made many important discoveries about Jupiter and Saturn, including rings around Jupiter and the presence of volcanism on Jupiter’s moon, Io. Voyager went on to make the first flybys of Uranus, where it discovered 10 new moons, and Neptune, where it found that Neptune actually weighs less than astronomers thought.

8. WMAP

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001, may not be as well-known, but it measures with unprecedented accuracy the temperature of the radiation left over from the Big Bang.

7. Spitzer

Another spacecraft with a profound effect on cosmology and astrophysics is the Spitzer Space Telescope, which observed the heavens through infrared light. This light, which has a longer wavelength than visual light, is mostly blocked by Earth’s atmosphere.

6.Spirit & Opportunity

Intended for just a 90-day mission, these workhorse Mars rovers have far outdone themselves, and are still chugging away on the red planet more than five years after landing. Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, landed on opposite sides of the planet in January 2004. 

5. Cassini-Huygens

This joint NASA/ESA spacecraft, launched in 1997, reached its destination, Saturn, in 2004. Since then it has been in orbit around the ringed world, taking one stunning snapshot after another of the planets rings, moons and weather.

4. Chandra

Since 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been scanning the skies in X-ray light, looking at some of the most distant and bizarre astronomical events. Because Earth’s pesky atmosphere blocks out most X-rays, astronomers couldn’t view the universe in this high-energy, short-wavelength light until they sent Chandra up to space. 

3. Viking

When NASA’s Viking 1 probe touched-down on Mars in July 1976, it was the first time a man-made object had soft-landed on the red planet. (Though the Soviet Mars 2 and 3 probes did land on the surface, they failed upon landing). The Viking 1 lander also holds the title of longest-running Mars surface mission, with a total duration of 6 years and 116 days. The spacecraft also sent the first color pictures back from the Martian surface, showing us what that mysterious red dot looks like from the ground for the first time.

2. Hubble

The most-loved of all NASA spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope has name recognition around the world. Its photos have changed the way everyday people figure themselves into the cosmos. The observatory has also radically changed science, making breakthroughs on astronomical issues too numerous to count. 

1. Apollo

NASA’s best space science mission? The one humans got to tag along on, of course! Not only was sending a man to the moon monumental for human history, but the Apollo trips were the first to bring celestial stuff back to Earth and greatly advanced our scientific understanding of the moon. 

Today is the centenary of Patrick White’s birth, May 28th 1912.

“In 1964, submerged by the suburbs reaching farther into the country, we left Castle Hill, and moved into the centre of the city. Looking back, I must also have had an unconscious desire to bring my life full circle by returning to the scenes of my childhood, as well as the conscious wish to extend my range by writing about more sophisticated Australians, as I have done in The Vivisector and The Eye of the Storm. On the edge of Centennial Park, an idyllic landscape surrounded by a metropolis, I have had the best of both worlds. I have tried to celebrate the park, which means so much to so many of us, in The Eye of the Storm and in some of the shorter novels of The Cockatoos. Here I hope to continue living, and while I still have the strength, to people the Australian emptiness in the only way I am able.”

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993

Dragon at the International Space Station

Another quote from Frank.