This week in space: special post, Curiosity rover

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First let me apologize for not having done a This week in space in sometime, I've just been lazy.

 

November 26th, 2011 Mars Science Laboratory left the confines of Earth and began it's journey to Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory successfully landed Curiosity, a Mars rover, in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012 at 05:14:39 UTC.

In the above photo The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) team in the MSL Mission Support Area react after learning the the Curiosity rove has landed safely on Mars and images start coming in at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Early Monday morning, August 5th EDT, first image taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, it was taken through a "fisheye" wide-angle lens on one of the rover's front left Hazard-Avoidance cameras at one-quarter of full resolution. The clear dust cover on the camera is still on in this view, and dust can be seen around its edge, along with three cover fasteners. The rover's shadow is visible in the foreground.

Interestingly NASA's Curiosity rover and its parachute were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as Curiosity descended to the surface on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image of Curiosity while the orbiter was listening to transmissions from the rover.

 

Check out the official mission project here and follow it on Twitter here. In the days to come color images should begin being taken as well as scientific data being reported as instrumentation turns on and gets to work. I've been awaiting Curiosity's landing on Mars since learning of it's proposal in late 2004. I slept very little last night too excited and worried that there would be some error causing the mission to fail. Now to be patient and await images and information in the coming months and even years.

Batman shootings

 A gunman opened fire early Friday at a suburban Denver movie theater, leaving at least 14 people dead and 50 others injured, Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said.

 

AURORA, Colo. A gunman opened fire early Friday at a suburban Denver movie theater, leaving at least 14 people dead and 50 others injured, Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said.

People are always amazed when I insist on sitting in the back row at movie theaters... people are always amazed why, everywhere but work, I usually have at least one firearm on me. I've also often told people that any terrorist group, given half a brain, would send 5-10 people into movie theaters all over the U.S. at the midnight showing of some big summer blockbuster with ballbearing bombs or easily obtainable illegally modified automatic weapons and do this.

Fortunately this was not an organized terrorist attack, sadly 14 people are dead at the time of me posting this but this could have been in the hundreds. But guess what, every theater I have ever been in is a 'gun free zone'... the owners happilly put placards and stickers in the windows banning knives and firearms. Well guess what, I don't give a shit... if you see mine and want to ask me leave I gladly will. The matter of the fact is there are lunatics that don't give a damn about your window decal and, whether you like it or not, will come into your establishment and do harm if they feel inclined to do so.

This gun toting American will continue to go see movies in the theater, in fact I'll go see Batman tonight or tomorrow. This gun toting American will continue to carry concealed into theaters that prohibit it as weel, please feel more than welcome to approach me and ask me to leave and I will but I'm not leaving my weapon system in my vehicle. I am not going to sit in your loud darken theater with no protection...

 

Articles about it HERE as well as HERE

Multiverse, time and deal with it!

You know it really bothers me that the multiverse exists. No seriously, I hate being one instance of myself here when there are far better ones elsewhere (in theory and likely for certain) in existence. Someday I’ll find a way to reach through to them intentionally, through the mind, to communicate with my other selves and try and learn from their experiences as well as share what I’ve learned to them too. Better yet perhaps I could figure out to do a multiverse-Vulcan-mind-meld with one or more of them and drastically improve all of our lives by sharing all of our knowledge, transferring skills and experiences so that we could effectively have had multiple lifetimes up to that point in our age being able to operate on each other’s knowledge to better our lives respectively. Maybe I’m crazy to think this is even possible but hey who needs sanity in an insane world?

I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately too. We all know time doesn’t exist and that it’s just a concept we’ve created as a state of mind, a mental concept, that we can’t even give a good description to. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately and tinkering with my perception of it… speeding up and slowing down my reality with varying levels of success. Sometimes I wish I could just push fast forward like on the movie click and blur by work and the bulk of my home life… then there are precious moments, spying a pulchritudinous woman, having conversation with someone that creates a roaring fire in my mind, beautiful and fleeting flashes in the world that I wish I could draw out to near eternity. There is no physical interaction with the concept we have as ‘time’ with existence so why can we not master it and manipulate it to serve us.  *sigh* If any billionaires, or even well off millionaires, want to support me and allow me to stop working so that I might be able to pursue such things and explore the possibilities I’d really appreciate it.

In other news I know I promised to start posting more frequently using speech to text to augment my ability to pump out content… I haven’t. I also haven’t done a This Week in Space in quite some time and I apologize but I just haven’t felt like it. Deal with it, you don’t pay for this… I do haha.