Mars Science Lab Chute is Ready

The parachute for the Mars Science Laboratory, which will be launched in 2011, recently passed its tests in the world's largest wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. The two engineering types at the bottom provide scale. MSL will be 9 feet long and weigh almost a ton, so, ya know, it needs a big chute. By comparison, Spirit and Opportunity are about 5 feet long and weigh just under 400 lbs.

Dominos, and then some

Kinetic sculpture gone wild! This is from Tim Fort:

I bet it took this guy over an hour to set this up. Or 400 hours, maybe. No really, who has the time for this?? But given the chance, who among us wouldn't do this? Nobody!

Earthrise

The Japanese Kayuga spacecraft, in orbit around the Moon since 2007, captured this high-definition video of the Earth rising. Nice.

2 Views of the Same Space

Here are two looks across the gulf between the Earth and our Moon. From the perspective of our day-to-day experience, the 240,000 miles separating these two worlds is an enormous distance (I have "only" 90,000 miles on my pickup truck), but from an interstellar perspective, it is a tiny distance. This is our galactic back yard. The views are from the space shuttle in Earth orbit, looking across at the Moon, and from the Japanese lunar spacecraft Kayuga, at the Moon, looking back at Earth.