Rover Opportunity Arrives at Spirit Point, Endeavour Crater

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NASA Mars Rover Arrives At New Site On Martian Surface, NASA

"After a journey of almost three years, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has reached the Red Planet's Endeavour crater to study rocks never seen before. On Aug. 9, the golf cart-sized rover relayed its arrival at a location named Spirit Point on the crater's rim. Opportunity drove approximately 13 miles (21 kilometers) after climbing out of the Victoria crater."

Marc's Note: Opportunity just keeps going and going and ... I wonder what discoveries she'll find at Endeavour crater.

NASA OIG Critical Of Paying For Employee Education

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NASA OIG: NASA's Payments for Academic Training and Degrees

"NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin today released an audit that found abuse in a NASA program that reimburses Agency employees for academic courses leading to undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate degrees. This Office of Inspector General (OIG) review concluded that NASA's decentralized management structure, coupled with a lack of strong internal controls, resulted in more than $1 million in questionable tuition payments to employees. Federal law prohibits NASA from funding academic degrees for civil service employees except through planned employee development programs that meet an identified training need, resolve a staffing problem, or accomplish the Agency's strategic goals. However, the OIG found that NASA routinely paid significant amounts of money to reimburse employees for academic courses taken outside its formal degree programs."

Do EVs Make You Anxious?

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The industry does a lot of minimizing of so-called "range anxiety" in electric vehicles. Oh, nobody ever really drives more than 100 miles in a day, they say. Those EV owners are just being ninnies, they say. Sure, in a world where everything worked exactly as advertised, it might be an irrele

Setting a Land Speed Record

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Last year I wrote a blog series about designing and building a diesel-powered, high efficiency motorcycle. The end result was a 6 hp single speed machine that more closely resembled a mini bike than a road-legal motorcycle. Since then, I have gradually improved on the original design. As the spee

The Modern PC Turns 30

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From Wired Top Stories:

The revolutionary IBM 5150 landed 30 years ago today. This gallery celebrates the IBM 5150 and nine other major milestones that helped the personal computer achieve its invaluable, and ubiquitous, place in society.

Read the whole article

Sun Unleashes X6.9 Class Flare

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On August 9, 2011 at 3:48 a.m. EDT, the sun emitted an Earth-directed X6.9 flare, as measured by the NOAA GOES satellite. These gigantic bursts of radiation cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to harm humans on the ground, however they can disrupt the atmosphere and disrupt GPS and communications signals. In this case, it appears the flare is strong enough to potentially cause some radio communication blackouts. It also produced increased solar energetic proton radiation -- enough to affect humans in space if they do not protect themselves.
There was also a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with this flare. CMEs are another solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space and affect electronic systems in satellites and on Earth. However, this CME is not traveling toward and Earth so no Earth-bound effects are expected.

Critical Milestone Reached for 2012 Landsat Mission

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The Operational Land Imager (OLI), built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo., has been approved by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for shipment to Orbital Sciences Corporation, Gilbert, Ariz. for integration onto the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) spacecraft.
"OLI will be more sensitive to land cover changes and characteristics across the landscape and over time than previous Landsat instruments," said James Irons, LDCM Project Scientist at NASA Goddard. "Analysts will be better able to identify and characterize land cover while also being better able to detect and monitor change."
A multitude of scientific, commercial and governmental users rely on Landsat as their primary source of moderate-resolution, multispectral, image data. OLI will measure Earth’s reflectance in nine portions of the spectrum, including visible light, near infrared, and shortwave infrared, providing data that scientists and others use to quantify changes in Earth’s landscapes.
OLI images will cover wide areas of the Earth's landscape while providing sufficient resolution to distinguish features like urban centers, farms, forests and other land uses. The OLI will provide Earth-imaging at 15-meter (49 ft.) panchromatic and 30-meter multispectral spatial resolutions along a 185 km (115 miles)-wide swath. The entire Earth will fall within view of the OLI once every 16 days from the near-polar LDCM orbit.
OLI represents advancement in Landsat sensor technology. Instruments on earlier Landsat satellites employed scan mirrors to sweep the instrument fields of view across the surface swath width and transmit light to a few detectors. The OLI will instead use long detector arrays, with over 7000 detectors per spectral band, aligned across its focal plane to view across the swath. The OLI design results in a more sensitive instrument providing improved land surface information with fewer moving parts. Engineers expect this new design to be more reliable while providing improved performance.
"OLI provides the key sensor technology to allow continuation of Landsat Earth observations into a fourth decade," said Ball Aerospace president and CEO, David L. Taylor. "This continuation is essential to maintain seamless acquisition of Earth-from-space images not captured by any other private or public source."
The Landsat program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). For nearly 40 years, Landsat satellites have continuously and consistently collected images of Earth, creating a historical archive unmatched in quality, detail, coverage and value. Freely available Landsat data provide a unique resource for people who work in agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping and global change research.
Landsat satellites capture unique Earth surface data vital to agriculture, water management, disaster response, scientific research, national security, and many other areas of societal benefit. "This is a crucial event for the LDCM mission and the Landsat Program," said Bruce Quirk, USGS coordinator for the Land Remote Sensing Program. "OLI will provide the data continuity that the science community has depended on for nearly 40 years."
NASA plans to launch LDCM in December 2012 as the follow-on to Landsat 5, launched in 1984, and Landsat 7, launched in 1999. Both are continuing to supply images and data, but they are operating well beyond their designed lives and suffer limitations due to aging. As with preceding Landsat missions, the U.S. Geological Survey will operate LDCM and maintain its data archive once it reaches orbit and begins observations. USGS plans to change the name of LDCM to Landsat 8 when USGS takes over operations after launch and on-orbit checkout. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. built the OLI instrument.
Orbital Sciences Corporation is building the LDCM spacecraft that will carry a two-sensor payload, the OLI and a Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), into space when launched in December 2012. Integration of the spacecraft and the two sensors will occur prior to shipping the assembled LDCM satellite to the Vandenberg Air Force Base, California launch site.

NASA Announces News Briefing on Mars Orbiter Science Finding

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NASA will host a news briefing on Thursday, Aug. 4, at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT) about a significant new Mars science finding. The briefing will be held at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
The new finding is based on observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2006. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Begins Science Orbits of Vesta

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NASA's Dawn spacecraft, the first ever to orbit an object in the main asteroid belt, is spiraling towards its first of four intensive science orbits. That initial orbit of the rocky world Vesta begins Aug. 11, at an altitude of nearly 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers) and will provide in-depth analysis of the asteroid. Vesta is the brightest object in the asteroid belt as seen from Earth and is thought to be the source of a large number of meteorites that fall to Earth.
The Dawn team unveiled the first full-frame image of Vesta taken on July 24:
This image was taken at a distance of 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometers). Images from Dawn's framing camera, taken for navigation purposes and as preparation for scientific observations, are revealing the first surface details of the giant asteroid. These images go all the way around Vesta, since the giant asteroid turns on its axis once every five hours and 20 minutes.
"Now that we are in orbit around one of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system, we can see that it's a unique and fascinating place," said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
After traveling nearly four years and 1.7 billion miles (2.8 billion kilometers), Dawn has been captured by Vesta's gravity, and there currently are 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) between the asteroid and the spacecraft. The giant asteroid and its new neighbor are approximately 114 million miles (184 million kilometers) away from Earth.
"We have been calling Vesta the smallest terrestrial planet," said Chris Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at UCLA. "The latest imagery provides much justification for our expectations. They show that a variety of processes were once at work on the surface of Vesta and provide extensive evidence for Vesta's planetary aspirations."
Engineers still are working to determine the exact time that Dawn entered Vesta's orbit, but the team has reported an approximate orbit insertion time of 9:47 p.m. PDT on July 15 (12:47 a.m. EDT on July 16).
In addition to the framing camera, Dawn's instruments include the gamma ray and neutron detector and the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer. The gamma ray and neutron detector uses 21 sensors with a very wide field of view to measure the energy of subatomic particles emitted by the elements in the upper yard (meter) of the asteroid's surface. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer will measure the surface mineralogy of both Vesta and Dawn's next target, the dwarf planet Ceres. The spectrometer is a modification of a similar one flying on the European Space Agency's Rosetta and Venus Express missions.
Dawn also will make another set of scientific measurements at Vesta and Ceres using the spacecraft's radio transmitter in tandem with sensitive antennas on Earth. Scientists will monitor signals from Dawn and later Ceres to detect subtle variations in the objects' gravity fields. These variations will provide clues about the interior structure of these bodies by studying the mass distributed in each gravity field.
"The new observations of Vesta are an inspirational reminder of the wonders unveiled through ongoing exploration of our solar system," said Jim Green, planetary division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Dawn launched in September 2007. Following a year at Vesta, the spacecraft will depart in July 2012 for Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015. Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Google Music vs. Amazon vs. Apple’s iCloud vs. Spotify vs. Rdio vs. … – Network World

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Google Music vs. Amazon vs. Apple's iCloud vs. Spotify vs. Rdio vs. ...
Network World
In this blog post I will describe the process I used to upload my music collection to each of these services, and will conclude by spelling out the pros and cons of each one. I won't declare a single winner, because each accomplishes different tasks ...

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2 for 1 Fares, Free Air and Free Unlimited Shore Excursions Announced for All … – News Junky Journal

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2 for 1 Fares, Free Air and Free Unlimited Shore Excursions Announced for All ...
News Junky Journal
... upload photos and send announcements and emails. The average couple saves $2500 on their honeymoon or celebration travel. To protect their client's investment and for their client's peace of mind, Best Cruises and Travel Now sells low-cost, ...

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