Years ago at a NASA press conference for a shuttle flight I went to the mike and said something like "thanks for the update on the STS OMS pods but might I suggest that you are employing excess AFE during these briefings?" After a beat to watch for baffled expressions from the front of the room I added...
Category: NASA Curiosity Rover
Years ago at a NASA press conference for a shuttle flight I went to the mike and said something like "thanks for the update on the STS OMS pods but might I suggest that you are employing excess AFE during these briefings?" After a beat to watch for baffled expressions from the front of the room I added "Oh, don't you know? AFE is acronyms for everything." I'd been sitting there soaked with alphabet soup and not always sure what the agency engineers and flight managers with their relentless insider patter were trying to say.
Looks like somebody else has the same feeling and came to the rescue of readers who might be watching streaming video or audio feeds during the upcoming MSL - er Mars Science Laboratory, aka Curosity - attempt to land on our neighbor planet during the late evening and early morning Sunday-Monday.
- AP - Alicia Chang:...
Bon voyage Curiosity, daughter of Mars...
Bon voyage Curiosity, daughter of Mars Science Laboratory, the big wheeled bruiser of a rover that NASA hopes to get off the ground Saturday. The aim is to land next August in ancient, gnarly Gale Crater not far south of the planet's equator. It is about 100 miles (154 km) across. Its midsection sports a pile of debris about as high as the Andes. The pic shows just part of the crater's complex terrain, gathered from orbit by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and its THEMIS imaging system. Grist has a link to the whole eye boggling gallery. The jumbled edifice, it appears, is a bit of a geologic mystery other than that an impact made it early in Mars's history, sediments buried it, and erosion has slowly re-exposed it...
Yes, the space shuttle Atlantis just rode its...
Yes, the space shuttle Atlantis just rode its tail of fire for its last time, and the last for any of these winged wonders that may have broken a lot of hearts with their tragedies, and a lot of NASA's budget, but we'll never see their like again (not me, not in my lifetime, I fear).
Meanwhile, back at NASA, what many regard as the real, lasting, and still healthy NASA space science effort, healthy enough anyway given the money hemorrhage that is the the human spaceflight directorate, moves toward its next extravaganza. That is Curiosity, aka the Mars Science Laboratory. The result of a $2.5 billion project, it is a heavily equipped machine the size of a small car that can get along on isotopes rather than solar...
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