In November, NASA launched the Mars Curiosity Rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). This video shows how it is going to gently touch down on the Martian surface. Curiosity is about the size of an SUV, so it needs a slightly gentler landing than Spirit and Opportunity’s slow bounce (which you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiEoGUHEobo from 1m onwards).
Later today, MSL’s spacecraft will perform some engine burns to properly target Gale Crater, the rover’s landing site.
It never ceases to amaze me - a spacecraft is lining up to hit a target 8 months away on a planet that’s still a full quarter of its orbit away from being in the right place. And it’s spinning, just like Earth, where it was launched from. I know, at the end of the day, it’s just maths, and the movement of the planets is entirely predictable, but I’m still impressed that all these factors can be taken into account and turned into a workable flight plan just from observations of the planets taken from Earth’s surface, while both planets are spinning and orbiting another, third body, at different speeds. And with different gravitational pulls.
Attempts to target other planets were being made alongside the first human beings going into space. Before any human eyes had been up there, just to check and say “yup, it’s what we thought”, primitive automated probes were already going much farther (with varied success!)
Too much information
I’m getting to grips with Java and just did a quick Google search to find out how to get a Unix timestamp. Please, bear witness to what happens when you go too far back when explaining something.
“Time is a physical property. For Physicists it is a dimension tightly coupled with space (spacetime). Time as a physical property (or dimension) passes uniformly.”
Yeah, I just need that timestamp example…
“We simply can’t define how fast time passes - we live inside of it. Just like a piece of driftwood in a river is unable to change its speed relative to the current we can not change our speed within time.”
I had to scroll to back up to ensure that, yes, this page really is entitled “Date and time in Java”. I feel like Brian Cox is explaining Java to me.
2012, I am in you
I hate the idea of New Year’s resolutions. As if I have to wait until 1st January to start being awesome. I started being awesome in 1978, fools. AND DID NOT STOP.
However, this apparently did not stop me from posting this last year:
“My new year’s resolution is to have a witty and insightful blog. That may be kind of a tall order, but it’s up against my other doomed new year’s resolutions: drinking less, running more…”
SCORECARD
The blog thing: 2011 was better. 7/10
Drinking less? Started off well, then… no. 3/10
Running more? For three glorious months around summer, this was looking like it was in the bag for good. Then I got made redundant, which sort of messed everything up, and now I have a job that requires more travelling, leaving less pre/post work running time. On the plus side, I am now (temporarily) living somewhere that I feel okay about stepping out the door and just running, rather than having to drive somewhere that I don’t feel I’ll get stabbed. So, I need to get on with that. Rather than posting about it on the internet. 4/10
Overall: 5/10. Must do better.
Going to try the running more/drinking less ones again this year. And I’m going to replace the blogging one with buying a house that doesn’t suck. Which indirectly means sourcing all the freelance work I can possibly fill my spare time with. Which will probably make me drink more and run less.
Lenticular clouds
BBC has some nice photos of lenticular clouds. But that’s not why I’m posting. I’m posting it because the shape looks familiar…
… or at least it does if you’ve played Halo.
Yeah. Aliens are in those clouds. Fact.
Life at 33.6kbps
The average webpage is now almost a megabyte in size. Back in what I hate to refer to as “the day”, downloading a megabyte of data was a serious time investment. It still surprises me that every page click is now the equivalent of 20 minutes of 1998 online time. Which was 20p when it was 1p per minute. Also, I had a shit modem. It was more software than hardware. Like a car with an engine made of feathers.
Also, I can’t miss an opportunity to snark. The article linked above says:
“Ryan Kim at news site Gigaom speculated that the growth in the amount of Javascript on webpage was down to the growing use of HTML5”
Actually, Ryan, the growth in the amount of Javascript on webpages is, in fact, down to the growing use of Javascript on webpages. Javascript-heavy pages have been on the increase a long time before HTML5 showed up.
