Mars, Mud and More

 

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE BALLARD:  Caught this pic of Bee's feet tonight outside Hale's Ales, where someone has stamped a long yellow brick 'road' alongside the south end of their building. Annabelle started skipping down it immediately. :)

BON VOYAGER: Today marks an amazing aerospace milestone - the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Voyager 2 space probe. It's interesting looking at this launch photo.

PHOTO: NASA/JPL

Perched atop a Titan/Centaur rocket it looks so retro, and at 35-years old I suppose it is. But what's gobsmacking about it is the damn thing's still going.

Over the past 35 years, Voyager 2 has passed Mars, Venus, the asteroid belt, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and beyond. Right now, Voyager 2 is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from the sun, heading in a southerly direction. And even as we 'speak' it's exploring interstellar space and making toward the next solar system! Unfreakingbelievable!

It's the longest-operating NASA spacecraft ever. NASA/JPL managers estimate Voyagers 1 and 2 spacecraft will have enough electrical power to continue collecting data and communicating it back to Earth through 2020, and possibly through 2025.

MUDDY: This weekend was another Mostly Very Not Fun one spent working around the house. Specifically, installing drywall/plasterboard in the addition. Boo hiss boo! Of course, Annabelle thought it was fun, begging to screw on drywall and mud and tape. CJ kept his distance. Smart boy. ;)

CAPITALISM 101: It's interesting - CJ doesn't spend as much time playing online games as he does studying them. For instance. while Annabelle would play Roblox 24/7 if we let her (exploring all the servers, chatting up a storm and such), CJ is busy memorizing the history of the Web site, reciting bios of its founders and so on. On the site, players can outfit their virtual bodies with gear and I think CJ has the whole catalog memorized. Many items are limited in the number sold, and once they're out, their value often climbs. This weekend CJ started doing some speculative buying. When an item went on sale that he thought would be popular, he'd buy it and then turn around and sell it - for a profit - a bit later. Since his first three stabs at venture capitalism made him some "Robux" he's a bit giddy with the for-profit possibilities. I think this counts as math education, right?

MEANWHILE, ON MARS: Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity continues to phone home and its news is remarkable. The compact car sized rover is working wonderfully!

Have I mentioned MSL has a frickin' laser?!?? This weekend the red rover vaporized some Martian rock. Oh yeah!!!


Its target was a fist-size rock called "Coronation." The laser is built into the MSL's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument. It his poor, defenseless Coronation with 30 pulses of its laser during a 10-second period. Each pulse delivers more than a million watts of power for about five one-billionths of a second. Take that, Mars!

Per a NASA press release, "The energy from the laser excites atoms in the rock into an ionized, glowing plasma. ChemCam catches the light from that spark with a telescope and analyzes it with three spectrometers for information about what elements are in the target."

By all reports, ChemCam is performing beautifully. "It's surprising that the data are even better than we ever had during tests on Earth, in signal-to-noise ratio," said ChemCam Deputy Project Scientist Sylvestre Maurice of the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. "It's so rich, we can expect great science from investigating what might be thousands of targets with ChemCam in the next two years."

Exciting stuff!