We Put A Car On Mars!

You know, it just catches my breath whenever I think about how we just LANDED A FRIKKIN CAR ON MARS!!! (Well, it's a car-sized rover.) Just look at the size of that thing:

Notice the full-sized grown ass dude/tte in the backgroud? That thing is huge!

It's feats like these that sustain my optimism for humanity's future (it's things like the mass pollution and denial of responsibility that's crushed the lives of people in Ecuador or Bhopal or you know the Holocaust and the Holodomor that sour that optimism. But, we've managed not to kill ourselves so far. Fingers crossed!) Still, come on, pretty effing cool! Here is a just a partial list of things they did to land that $2.5 billion roving precision science lab and state-of-the-art robot: launch it into space; develop heat-shield to enter Martian atmosphere; deploy parachute that can take 65K lbs of force to slow it down from 1000s of MPH to 200 MPH; use a ROCKET PACK to slow it down further; use a "sky-crane" to set it down on the ground; and because of time delay to Mars (14 minutes) all this had to be done automatically. It landed itself. Or rather they (all those systems) landed it on their own.

All this to answer some fundamental questions about our existence in the universe, namely one of the mission goals is to determine if life is or ever was present on Mars. I am of the camp that hopes they find life or its footprint. Kim Stanley Robinson is of the camp that hopes they don't (JK: just something he said in regards to his Mars trilogy at a reading one time).

Anywho, here's the trailer for the Movie that just happened on Mars:

Gulp!

Attack of the Lyrids as seen from the ISS

You might not have known it, but the Earth was attacked in April from the Lyrids. Their bombardment peaked on April 21st, followed by the largest hit which came from an object estimated to be about the size of a mini-van and coming it at 43 kilometers a second: the Sutter's Mill meteorite. It hit on April 22nd with an energy yield of ~4 kilotons of TNT. Take a look for yourself from footage taken from the ISS, the blue-white explosions are meteor strikes:

This video is gorgeous! You got a view from the ISS of cities at night against the curve of the earth, a backdrop of stars, and a layer of Aurora. Mind is blown.

Robot Folding Socks

That sounds like a line from a haiku. But the video below looks like an act of war. Yes, war: it starts with socks, and it ends with folding human bodies into suitcases that the robot overlords (the Pod?) shoot into the sun.

It actually kinda sorta looks like Rosie the Robot Maid:

Tornado on the Sun

That's right, a tornado... of super-heated plasma! For 30 hours on February 7 & 8, 2012, cool plasma (cooler than the surface of the Sun) spun around in competing magnetic forces in a tornado the size of the Earth at somewhere near 300,000 kph. I have no response to that.