During the coming solar conjunction of Mars, and the moratorium in communications, #Ingenuity will use its color camera to study the movement of sand, which poses an ever-present challenge to Mars missions.
Only three humans have ever witnessed an eclipse of the Sun by the Earth. It happened while the Apollo 12 crew was returning home from the Moon, on November 21, 1969.
Fortunately, the astronauts filmed the moment so you can share in the experience.
Tomorrow, watch Japan's attempt to land their SLIM spacecraft on the moon! The livestream link is below, and the landing will be at approximately 10:20 am ET on Friday, January 19. If they succeed, they will be the fifth country (U.S., Soviet Union, China, India) to accomplish this feat!
Before I talk about my odd little niche WordPress projects, what are some of your blogs or personal projects, WordPress or otherwise? If you comment and link to them here, I'll definitely check them out! I like to see people's projects, what they've made and what they continue to work on. The fediverse has been really cool for seeing a lot of that. I'm also interested in how long we're able to keep passion projects going amidst the crazy chaos of life. It can be tough! But writing and making things is always super rewarding, as well-- at least it has been for me.
I think I've always liked writing, I like music and that's basically mostly or all writing. At least it is for the lyrics of the vaguely rock type stuff I usually end up making. I write a lot of lyrics, short little bits, phrases. But for longer pieces, I've always liked the ease of writing and reading blogs and digital journals. I'm not one for writing in physical journals. I do like reading physical books, but for writing, but I prefer to type.
Over the years, I've had the chance to experiment with different forms and styles of blogs, just as I've liked to do when designing websites. That was the initial appeal of microblogs like Twitter, things like Livejournal before it, and the huge appeal of WordPress, which of course you can use for short OR long form writing.
I first started playing around with WordPress back around 2008. It was different back then! If you had a free plan, you could change the name of your blog to whatever you wanted as much as you wanted (something they don't allow anymore but was super useful if you needed to rebrand) etc, and all kinds of other differences (no block editor back then, either, obviously!)
I do still have a blog running from back then. It's called space. time. tech. (https://spacetimetech.wordpress.com). The topics I wrote about on the blog are probably obvious from its title. I've been (pretty infrequently) updating that one for 15 years this year. Wow.
The second oldest blog I still run I've mentioned here before. It's called Animated TV Blog (https://animatedtvblog.wordpress.com), and again, as its name fairly obviously suggests, I write about my favorite cartoons. I started Animated TV Blog in 2010 and it's been a blast, even just doing the infrequent updates. And I've been doing it for 13 years this year- another really long-running blog I've been able to maintain somehow (you gotta love the content!) I had a pretty active linked Twitter account too that I ran alongside ATB (back when Twitter was just microblogging, and not a fascist wasteland) for many years. Again, I believe the key to good blog writing is picking a topic or topics that you really love-- something you're really passionate about (not just a fad or a passing interest). That way, you'll be more likely to continue to want to write on the blog. At least it worked for me, in the case of ATB!
My most recently created WordPress blog isn't updated anymore, but the posts are all still up and viewable. It was called Tech User Today (https://techusertoday.wordpress.com) and it was an experiment to try and make something a little more professional, to try and monetize with affiliate links (there's a lot of competition out there). I ended up taking on a bunch of outside reviews, and it was pretty cool, but it also quickly became overwhelming and not enjoyable. I started that one in 2018 and I stopped writing posts for it around two years later, in 2020.
One last thing I've learned from writing WordPress blogs, always make sure to update and maintain your themes! Older default themes tend to start to look outdated or crappy. Just like any good website, it's best to just make sure you like the look of what you're making, and to remember you can always switch up the look of it- I've definitely done this several times over the last 15 years.
If you read all this, you're awesome. And make sure to comment with your own projects!
Let’s take a look at the recent announcement of the “astonishing” discovery of a global subsurface ocean on Saturn’s “Death Star” icy moon Mimas.
The discovery is based on new modeling/simulation of Mimas’s "wobble" (libration) around its axis, its orbital shift over 13 years and Mimas’s tidal heating. It rules out the alternate hypothesis of an oval shaped rocky core. There is no direct evidence of liquid water.
Absolute nonsense #ESA plans for space generated solar power. IIRC, one of the studies was supposed to be delivered two years ago.
Such huge structures in space will be highly vulnerable to space debris or malicious attacks, to name just two apparently unsolvable security problems. It'll be interesting to see what the numbers say, when comparing the total cost for such a monstrosity with similar plans for solar power generation on the surface of the Earth.
The Event Horizon Telescope has unveiled how Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, looks like in polarised light, which tells us a lot about the magnetic field around this monster.
The lines overlaid on the image below mark the orientation of the polarisation, from which astronomers can work out the structure of the magnetic field around the black hole.
How does "The first robotic servicing mission on the surface of Mars" sound to y'all?
Well, if you're #NASA#JPL, this awesome headline could be yours for the low cost of a few nitrogen puffs!
This thread is just me fantasizing how Perseverance could potentially use its gDRT to clean the dusty solar panel and camera lens on Ingenuity and make history with this extraordinary servicing operation! 🧵
I live on the west coast of Sweden, just north of Gothenburg. I'm married and we have a son who will turn 18 in just a few days. I work in tech, with business-critical systems for the eCommerce sector. I'm #autistic and have #ADHD, was not diagnosed until I was 34. My interests are many, such as #science#tech#politics#climatechange#education#healthcare#travel#space and of course everything about #ecommerce.
If a human is exposed to raw space vacuum, they will not freeze any time soon. Vacuum is an excellent insulator, because there is no matter that can transport away your heat (convection), like in an atmosphere or liquid. Managing heat is actually a problem in space, especially with sunlight.
Rapid evaporation may cause cooling in certain parts of the body though.
Latest episode of Star Trek: SNW got this wrong, so has a lot of other shows, movies and books in the past.
Instead of being screamed at for attention by "influencers" (whatever THAT means), here on Mastodon/the fedi, I have great, regular conversations with REAL PEOPLE (that's the key here! REAL people!) about music, TV, science, and tech stuff, and I see art and photos of animals and things in space. It's just nice.
From time to time #Perseverance uses its fixed down looking camera, or EDL_RDCAM, to record movies of, well, the ground 🥴 , probably while the ground radar RIFMAX does its thing. And let's not forget that it's the same camera that captured those epic images during the rover's descent to the Martian ground.
Debayered, processed EDL_RDCAM
Image captured from RMC 51.0030
Sol 1094, LMST: 12:55:27
Another robotic mission to the moon is set to launch this week.
Intuitive Machines, in collaboration with NASA, will launch its Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, which will land near the lunar south pole. IM-1 is the first of 3 missions scheduled this year.
Launch will take place at 12:57 a.m. ET Feb. 14 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from KSC. Landing will occur 9 days later.
If successful, this will be the first American commercial landing on the moon.
Interesting fact of the day: Not counting point sources of light, any source of light that doesnt appear as a single point will have the same brightness no matter what distance you happen to be from it.
In fact the opposite is true in a sense. Once you get close enough to an object that you can no longer see the whole object within your field of view, then it will get less bright as you get closer.
Amazingly this even applies to the sun. IF you were at the surface of the sun, just a few feet away (Such that 1 meter square of the surface of the sun was within your field of vision) it would only appear to be 93 lumens bright. That would be equivalent to only a 6 watt incandescent light bulb! Compare that to the brightness of the sun from earth which is a whopping 127,000 lumens.
The expansion of the universe could be a mirage, new theoretical study suggests (68k.news)
The expansion of the universe could be a mirage, a potentially controversial new study suggests....