I’m not going to do anything other than launch straight into this post. Taken from EarthSky.
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Curiosity rover on Mars snags highest-resolution panorama yet
Posted by Eleanor Imster in Space | Today’s Image|March 5, 2020
This just in … a new super-cool composite from Curiosity on Mars. The panorama contains more than 1,000 images taken last Thanksgiving and assembled over the past few months … 1.8 billion new pixels of Martian landscape!
Yesterday (March 4, 2020) NASA released a panoramic image of the Martian surface captured by the Curiosity rover. It’s the highest-resolution panorama yet of the planet’s surface.
Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; meanwhile, it relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution, nearly 650-million-pixel panorama that includes the rover’s deck and robotic arm.
The panorama showcases Glen Torridon, a region on the side of Mount Sharp that Curiosity is exploring. They were taken between November 24 and December 1, 2019, when the mission team was out for the Thanksgiving holiday. NASA said:
Sitting still with few tasks to do while awaiting the team to return and provide its next commands, the rover had a rare chance to image its surroundings from the same vantage point several days in a row.
| NASA’s Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama of the Martian surface between November 24 and December 1, 2019. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ MSSS.| Along with an almost 1.8-billion-pixel panorama that doesn’t feature the rover, NASA’s Curiosity also captured a 650-million-pixel panorama that features the rover itself. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ MSSS.
It required more than 6 1/2 hours over the four days for Curiosity to capture the individual shots. Mastcam operators programmed the complex task list, which included pointing the rover’s mast and making sure the images were in focus. To ensure consistent lighting, they confined imaging to between noon and 2 p.m. local Mars time each day.
In 2013, Curiosity produced a 1.3-billion-pixel panorama using both Mastcam cameras; its black-and-white Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, provided images of the rover itself.
Bottom line: Highest-resolution yet panorama of Martian surface by Mars Curiosity rover.
Eleanor Imster has helped write and edit EarthSky since 1995. She was an integral part of the award-winning EarthSky radio series almost since it began until it ended in 2013. Today, as Lead Editor at EarthSky.org, she helps present the science and nature stories and photos you enjoy. She also serves as one of the voices of EarthSky on social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and G+. She and her husband live in Tennessee and have two grown sons.
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When one stops and reflects one can’t hide the scale of progress that humans have achieved. It is incredible!
It is also a struggle to take the situation so expertly spoken about by George Monbiot in yesterday’s post and square it with the achievement covered in today’s post.
Today and tomorrow I am posting essays that have nothing to do with dogs! Today, I am sharing George’s gloom about the future, tomorrow I am sharing our human capacity for incredible ingenuity and technology.
Because I sense we are a species of two extremes; the very mad and the very clever!
I don’t have an answer but I can share these two essays.
Our legal action against the government aims to shut down fossil fuels
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th March 2020
Our survival is not an afterthought. The defence of the living planet cannot be tacked retrospectively onto business as usual. Yet this is how almost all governments operate. They slap the word “sustainable” on damaging projects they have already approved, then insist this means they’ve gone green. If we are to survive and prosper, everything must change. Every decision should begin with the question of what the planet can withstand.
This means that any discussion about new infrastructure should begin with ecological constraints. The figures are stark. A paper published in Nature last year showed that existing energy infrastructure, if it is allowed to run to the end of its natural life, will produce around 660 gigatonnes of CO2. Yet, to stand a reasonable chance of preventing more than 1.5°C of global heating, we can afford to release, in total, no more than 580 gigatonnes. In other words, far from building new fossil power plants, the survival of a habitable planet means retiring the damaging projects that have already been built. Electricity plants burning coal and gas and oil will not secure our prosperity. They will destroy it.
But everywhere special interests dominate. Construction projects are driven, above all, by the lobbying of the construction industry, consultancies and financiers. Gigantic and destructive schemes, such as the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, are invented by lobbyists for the purpose of generating contracts. Political support is drummed up, the project achieves its own momentum, then, belatedly, a feeble attempt is made to demonstrate that it can somehow become compatible with environmental promises. This is what destroys civilisations: a mismatch between the greed of economic elites and the needs of society.
But last week, something momentous happened. The decision to build a scheme with vast financial backing and terrible environmental impacts was struck down by the Court of Appeal. The judges decided that government policy, on which planning permission for a third runway at Heathrow was based, had failed to take account of the UK’s climate commitments, and was therefore unlawful. This is – or should be – the end of business as usual.
On Tuesday, we delivered a “letter before action” to the Treasury solicitor. We’ve given the government 21 days to accept our case and change its policy to reflect the climate commitments agreed by Parliament. If it fails to do so, we shall issue proceedings in the High Court to have the policy declared unlawful. We’ll need money, so we’ve launched a crowdfunding appeal to finance the action.
It’s hard to see how the government could resist our case. The Heathrow judgement hung on the government’s national policy statement on airports. This, the judges found, had not been updated to take account of the Paris climate agreement. New fossil fuel plants, such as the gas burners at Drax in Yorkshire the government approved last October, are enabled by something very similar: the national policy statements on energy infrastructure. These have not been updated since they were published in 2011. As a result, they take no account of the Paris agreement, of the government’s new climate target (net zero by 2050, as opposed to an 80% cut) or of Parliament’s declaration of a climate emergency. The main policy statement says that the European Emissions Trading System “forms the cornerstone of UK action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector”. As we have left the EU, this, obviously, no longer holds. The planning act obliges the government to review its national policy statements when circumstances change. It has failed to do so. It is disregarding its own laws.
These outdated policy statements create a presumption in favour of new fossil fuel plants. Once a national policy statement has been published, there is little objectors can do to prevent damaging projects from going ahead. In approving the Drax plant, the secretary of state for business and energy at the time (Andrea Leadsom) insisted that the policy statement came first, regardless of the climate impacts. Catastrophic decisions like this will continue to be made until the statements change. They are incompatible with either the government’s new climate commitments or a habitable planet.
While we are challenging the government’s energy policies, another group – the Transport Action Network – is about to challenge its road building schemes on the same basis. It points out that the national policy statement on road networks is also outdated and incompatible with the UK’s climate commitments. The policy statement, astonishingly, insists that “any increase in carbon emissions is not a reason to refuse development consent“, unless the increase is so great that the road would prevent the government from meeting its national targets. No single road project can be disqualified on these grounds. But the cumulative effect of new road building ensures that the UK will inevitably bust its carbon targets. While carbon emissions are officially disregarded, minuscule time savings are used to justify massive and damaging projects.
Transport emissions have been rising for the past five years, partly because of road building. The government tries to justify its schemes by claiming that cars will use less fossil fuel. But because they are becoming bigger and heavier, new cars sold in the UK now produce more carbon dioxide per kilometre than older models.
The perverse and outdated national policy statement locks into place such damaging projects as the A303 works around Stonehenge, the A27 Arundel scheme, the Lower Thames crossing, the Port of Liverpool access road, the Silvertown tunnel in London and the Wensum Link road in Norfolk. A government seeking to protect the lives of current and future generations would immediately strike down the policy that supports these projects, and replace it with one that emphasised walking, cycling and public transport.
A third action has been launched by Chris Packham and the law firm Leigh Day, challenging HS2 on similar grounds. Its carbon emissions were not properly taken into account, and its environmental impacts were assessed before the government signed the Paris agreement.
Already, the Heathrow decision is resonating around the world. Now we need to drive its implications home, by suing for survival. If we can oblige governments to resist the demands of corporate lobbyists and put life before profit, humanity might just stand a chance.
I have written previously about the dog’s nose and their ability to smell.
Dogs have millions of smell receptors that can detect countless smells, including the smells of changes going on inside our bodies. (Photo: RedTC/Shutterstock)
But there’s more to their nose that just the millions of smell receptors.
A new study has found that dogs can pick out objects that are warmer than ambient temperature
By Brigit Katz , smithsonianmag.com, March 4th, 2020
A dog’s cold nose could be used for heat seeking. (Photo by Angelika Warmuth/picture alliance via Getty Images)
If you’ve ever given a dog a boop on the snout, you may have noticed that its rhinarium—the furless patch of skin that surrounds the nostrils—is wet and cool. A new study published in Scientific Reports has found that these chilly rhinaria make dogs sensitive to radiating heat, which in turn might help them track down warm-blooded prey.
Dog noses are chock full of nerve endings—they have more than 100 million sensory receptor sites in their nasal cavities, compared to humans’ six million—making them extraordinarily keen sniffers. It thus seemed likely, according to the study authors, that dogs’ rhinaria serve some sort of sensory function.
Low tissue temperature seems to compromise sensory sensitivity in animals with one notable exception: crotaline snakes, also known as pit vipers, which seem to strike more accurately at warm-blooded prey when their heat-sensitive pit organs—located between each eye and nostril—are colder. Cool snakes are also more sensitive to thermal radiation. Perhaps, the researchers theorized, pooches deploy their noses for heat detection, too.
To test the theory, the researchers trained three pet dogs to choose the warmer of two panels. One, according to Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky, was heated to between 51 and 58 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the ambient temperature, similar to the body temperature of a fur-covered mammal. The other, which served as the control, had a “neutral” temperature close to that of the ambient environment. After the training, the dogs were put to the test in a double-blind experiment; neither they nor the people carrying out the trial knew from the get-go which object was warmer, since nothing visually distinguished them.
Still, all three dogs were able to home in on the warmer object, suggesting that they can detect even weak thermal radiation. “[T]he temperature of the mammalian bodies that emit [thermal radiation is not very high, unlike the Sun for instance,” first study author Anna Bálint, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden, tells Gizmodo. To pick up on the heat radiating from warm-blooded prey, dogs would need “very sensitive sensors.”
The nose seemed like the most likely candidate leading the dogs in the right direction. All other parts of a dog’s body are covered in insulating fur, with the exception of the eyes, which “are not suitable for receiving infrared radiation, because the sensitive structures are hidden behind a thick layer of tissue,” study co-author Ronald Kröger, also a Lund University biologist, tells Gizmodo. But to test their theory once again, the researchers conducted functional MRI scans of the brains of 13 pet dogs. The left somatosensory cortex in dogs’ brains—which “delivers input from the nose,” according to Virginia Morell of Science—was more responsive to objects emitting weak thermal radiation than neutral objects.
The researchers don’t know precisely how dog rhinaria convert energy into a nervous signal, and it’s not clear whether pups’ heat-detecting abilities are particularly effective if their hypothetical prey is far away. The test objects were placed around five feet from the dogs; Gary Settles, a mechanical engineer at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the study, tells Science that he doubts “dog rhinarium can distinguish patterns of hot and cold objects at a distance.”
But for shorter distances, at least, being able to sense the heat emanating from prey could help canines hunt even if their sight, smell or hearing is obscured. That may not matter much to domestic dogs, but their closest wild relative, the grey wolf, preys on large, warm-blooded animals. “[T]he ability to detect the radiation from warm bodies would be advantageous for such predators,” the authors note in the study. And perhaps most importantly, the study offers yet another reason as to why your dog is great: Its nose knows more than you might think.
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The more that we understand our favourite pooch, the more that we are in awe of them. Their noses are incredible. To be honest, it is very difficult to comprehend just what this primary sense of dogs means to a dog.
I will take the closing sentence of the article to close my own thoughts:
To be honest, it is very difficult to comprehend just what this primary sense of dogs means to a dog.
Coyotes are not dogs but they are cousins to the dog.
All of which made the following story on Mother Nature News one that had to be shared. I just hope that a link to the original story is sufficient for copyright.
This is the story!
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Coyote finds old dog toy, acts like a puppy
A photographer spotted a coyote as it trotted into her yard and explored a toy left in the snow. What she managed to capture on camera is the beauty of play.
This coyote took a liking to a blue stuffed dog toy and had a playful romp in the snow with it. (All photos: Pamela Underhill Karaz)
Photographer Pamela Underhill Karaz lives in Trenton Falls, New York, in a rural area. Her own property is 48 acres of forest and field, which means she gets to see her fair share of wildlife right in her own backyard. “We’ve had coyotes living around us for years. We hear them mostly during the summer evenings,” she told MNN. But something much more than simply hearing a few coyote howls happened two years ago.
She tells us, “Our driveway is a quarter-mile long and lined with 45-year-old balsam trees. Being a photographer, I’m always on the lookout for wildlife activity. I spotted the coyote while having our morning coffee. He was one-third of the way down our driveway. He went to the middle, looked across then decided to come back up a bit. He left his scent on a downed branch (that’s how I know it was a male), then went into the trees and popped out up at the edge of our yard. Looked around, checked out and sniffed some tracks in our yard and when he was further along he noticed the toy. He made his way over to it, sniffed around it where our dog had rolled, sniffed the toy, picked it up, dropped it, sniffed it again.”
Then that’s when the magic happened. “[He] picked it up then proceeded to toss it up in the air and play with it, just like a dog would toss a toy around. It lasted perhaps five to 10 minutes, from picking up the toy, tossing it in the air, picking it up again and almost bucking around with it … then he just casually trotted off with it.”
Underhill Karaz notes that her dogs often leave their stuffed toys out in the yard and more than one has disappeared before. She guesses that this is perhaps not the first time the coyote had played (and run off with) her dogs’ toys.
Many animal species exhibit play, and yet we humans can’t help but look on in awe when we recognize it in species beyond the domestic dogs and cats we keep as companions. We get so used to thinking of wildlife as efficient and purposeful, wasting no energy. For the young of many species, play is indeed an essential part of growing up. Through play, juveniles learn everything they’ll need for adulthood from how to hunt to how to fight to how to navigate the social structure of their community. So we look on with joy but without much surprise when fox pups romp with each other and bear cubs tumble around together. But when the play carries on into adulthood, that’s when we stare with amazement, remembering we aren’t the only animals who like to inject a little joy into our day with silliness.
“This was such a wonderful reminder that all animals, the wild and the not so wild (our pets) are really not so different,” Underhill Karaz says. “They have personalities, they have feelings, and they do their best to survive in what is sometimes a very unfriendly world. They are not so very different than us.”
Let me repeat that last paragraph that Pamela wrote:
“This was such a wonderful reminder that all animals, the wild and the not so wild (our pets) are really not so different,” Underhill Karaz says. “They have personalities, they have feelings, and they do their best to survive in what is sometimes a very unfriendly world. They are not so very different than us.”
I would just add that like dogs coyotes are creatures of integrity!
Coming up to two weeks and thanks to Tom and Gilliwolfe we, too, have shared every step of the way. As usual, taken from here.
Enjoy Day Eleven!
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Day 11: Indiana to Arriate 14k
By Tom and Chica, 30th January, 2020
Written by Tom’s wife.
After her two day camping adventure, we gave Chica a day off and once again Merlin stepped into the breach. Also, Synnove, our lovely neighbour here in Jimera was going along for the day.
Starting from Indiana and heading towards the city of Ronda, this was gentler country of pasture and olive orchards. The cliffs that surround the city drew nearer and seemed particularly impressive when viewed from below.
A steep winding path took them up to the top of the cliffs and into the old town. They crossed the famous Puente Nuevo bridge which separates the ‘new’ town built around the 12th century from the ancient Moorish old town. The view is spectacular and you have to jostle for position the get the essential ‘me on the bridge in Ronda’ pic.
After a coffee here, they headed to the top of the town, past the railway station, through the industrial area and back into the countryside. Merlin took all this in his stride and it became clear that he was the better option for the urban parts of the journey. Chica would have found this quite stressful.
After a slight map reading error leading to an unscheduled tour of the surrounding area, they resorted to GPS and found their way back to the route, which headed north-east towards Arriete. The going was easy; tarmacked road though cultivated fields and grazing land. Every property here seems to be guarded by a gang of barking dogs and most have ‘Beware of the Dog’ signs of varying degrees of crudity, but this one was rather good, they thought.
Reaching Arriete, they headed to the station. Technically, dogs are not allowed on trains in Spain but we have managed to take ours a short distance by looking pathetic and saying “No entiendo” (I don’t understand) a lot. This was unnecessary here as the lady in the ticket office was clearly a dog lover and made a huge fuss of Merlin. We’ll see if they’re as lucky tomorrow when Tom and Chica try and get the train back to Arriate. Then I can have a lie-in!
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I love that about putting the dog on the train! 🙂
Just a small but fascinating item on this amazing walk. The walk along GR7.
Susan said in response to yesterday’s post: “It feels as if we are joining them on their adventure.”
I said I truly felt the same way.
This walk of Tom and his dogs is so wonderfully described, and written up by Gilliwolfe, that it does feel that we are sharing the adventure; albeit in spirit only.
The photographs are to die for as well.
Here’s the next chapter.
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Days 9 and 10 Bonacoaz to Indiana via Montejaque 34k
By Tom and Chica, 29th January, 2020.
Written by Tom’s wife.
Another glorious day but it took us quite a while to get organised. Tom was determined not to forget anything vital for the first overnighter so it was 10.30 by the time we left. Making our way back to Benacoaz through Ubrique, where Los Alcornacales gives way to the Sierra de Grazalema, the landscape looked stunning in the sunshine.
Setting off all together, we climbed out of the village between fields dotted with wild iris onto the ridge above where I left the intrepid pair for their two-day trek. Tom had done this walk before a few years ago and had loved it so was keen to revisit.
Grazalema Natural Park was designated a Unesco Biosphere reserve in 1977 and the Sierra de Grazalema was declared the first natural park in Andalucia in 1984. It is one of Spain’s most ecologically outstanding areas. The 51,695 hectare park is famous for its spectacularly rugged limestone landscape of cliffs, gullies, caves and gorges.
The region is well known for being the rainiest place in Spain, with an annual rainfall of 2,200mm, which means that the 1,300 Mediterranean plant species that have been registered here, many of them endemic and some of them unique to the Sierra, flourish.
The town of Grazalema, which nestles between two rugged peaks is well worth a visit, not only because of its spectacular setting, but because there is a bakery selling the best cakes I’ve ever tried. Sadly for Tom, this wasn’t on today’s route.
With large birds of prey cruising on the thermals above, the pair headed down the concrete track – easy on the feet – through the forest with views to the Montes Grupo de Libar (Libar mountain range) beyond. The path then climbed up a rocky staircase between peaks before descending through scrubland to the vast flat-bottomed Libar valley. This is really a high plain and the lush grass provides grazing for the local cattle, giving the area the appearance of a prairie in a Western.
They headed west on an undefined path until reaching a large stone hut which offers shelter to hikers in summer but was closed up, presumably not anticipating mad Englishmen and their dogs arriving in mid-winter. However, it provided a good spot to strike camp, with water and a table for cooking and eating. Once she’d been fed and watered, Chica wanted to go to bed. She sat in her night jacket demanding entry to the tent but had to wait while Tom ate his freeze-dried hot pot!
Sleep was a little disturbed as Chica growled at the various grunts and howls in the night. At one point, Tom got up to investigate, concerned that there may be a hoard of marauding wild boar in the vicinity. There wasn’t, but the clear night sky was beautiful so far from civilisation.
In the morning, it was cold as the surrounding peaks screened the sun. Out of the early mist, a herd of small deer, probably roe, crossed the valley and a fox passed close by, alerting a sleepy Chica who opened one eye and then went back to sleep.
By 10, breakfasted and packed, they continued to the end of the high plain. From here the track gradually descended towards the pueblo blanco (white village) of Montejaque. Here they relaxed in a café for a while before continuing over the next range of hills to meet me on the road a few miles outside Ronda. Chica looked very pleased to see us!
“Was it as good as you remembered?” I asked.
“Absolutely, and more.”
“And the camping? Everyone here thought you’d freeze to death”
“Ha – as if! It was great!”
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Wonderful! Just take, for example, that last photograph. What colours, what intense contrast, what a beautiful scene.
That isn’t the only one by far!
I don’t want this walk to end and I’m sure you echo my thoughts.
For my previous post was entitled Day Eight etc. and this one is also called Day Eight.
Ah well, it’s the content that counts!
Which is to say that the next three days are, again, devoted to Tom’s walk along GR7.
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Day 8: Cerra de la Fantasia to Benacoaz 16k
By Tom and Chica, 27th January, 2020.
Written by Tom’s wife.
Authors note: Because we have had such a long weather delay, I have decided to number only the days that Tom and Chica actually walk otherwise it is going to give a very unrealistic idea of how long it takes. That is why today is Day 8 and the last walking day was originally Day 10 (but is now Day 7). I have updated all the blog references to correspond.
We were up with the lark this morning. Earlier in fact, as it was still dark but we were keen after such a long rain delay. We left the village in fog and went in and out of the sun and mist all the way up to the start point miles into the forest. It was still murky there too and we didn’t hang around as there was a gathering of hunters. Their dogs were in trailers, barking with excitement as this is probably the only time they ever get let out of their cages. But what happens to them after the end of the season next week? I can’t bear to think about it. But that’s why we’re doing this – so onwards and upwards my faithful duo!
After coming out of the forest onto the road, the trees gave way to scrub and the track roughly followed the same route as the road. The mist made it hard to get a feel for the surrounding landscape at first but then as the mist became patchy there were glimpses of the majestic valley and surrounding mountains – a truly spectacular view but impossible to capture on a phone camera.
The track crossed the road and descended to the river – Rio de Ubrique – which heads towards the town of the same name. After a bit of a clamber up a steep, wet, rocky and rather unsavoury path between agricultural outbuildings, we popped out right next to the town sign.
It was a pleasant stroll through the comparatively large and bustling town centre. The sun was now properly out and so Tom stopped in a plaza outside the Town Hall and had a coffee while Chica scrounged titbits by breathing in and contriving to look half starved! Carrying on up through the narrow streets, they arrived at the Convento de Capuchinos where a sign to Benacoaz pointed up a cobbled road: the Calzada Romana (Roman Road).
This proved quite tough on the feet as the cobbles were uneven and scattered but after 3.5k it emerged into the village of Bonacoaz, perched on the side of the mountain with vast panoramic views south – stunning end to today’s beautiful walk.
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I know I have said it before, and undoubtedly I will say it again, but this account of Tom’s walk with his two dogs is astounding! They have been walking for over a week and they are experiencing countryside and more that must be unique to Spain.
I was born towards the tail end of 1944; six months before the end of WWII in Europe.
As such I was in my early twenties when NASA came to the wider attention of millions of people with their effort to put a man on the moon. It was enthralling to look up at the night sky when a moon was present and think that in time there would be a man standing on the moon’s surface.
Now that I am 75 many things have changed. But one of them has not: Staring up at the night sky and getting lost in thought. Luckily we live in a rural location without artificial light anywhere nearby and the night skies are very clear.
All of which takes me back to my days of sailing. From 1986 until 1991 I lived on a deep-water ketch, a Tradewind 33, based in Larnaca, in Cyprus. Each Spring, I would solo across to the Turkish coast, or the Greek coast, and meet up with friends, or my son and daughter, and go coastal cruising. Then in the last year I sailed for England. I well recall seeing the night sky all around me with the stars practically down the watery horizon.
But more of that some other day. Now back to the moon.
All of which is to republish this post and I do hope you will be able to read it fully.
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NASA video reconstructs the harrowing lunar journey of Apollo 13
NASA’s reconstruction of the moon’s far side is based off images received by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. (Photo: NASA/Snapshot from video/YouTube)
On April 15, 1970, NASA astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise aboard Apollo 13 set a Guinness World Record for the highest absolute altitude attained by a crewed spacecraft at a distance of 248,655 miles from Earth. Nearly 50 years later, that unplanned record still stands as part of a mission beset by technical glitches and saved by engineering heroism.
“We didn’t slow down, unlike the others, when we got to the moon because we needed its gravity to get back, so we hold the altitude record,” Lowell told the Financial Times in 2011. “I never even thought about it. Records are only made to be broken.”
Gliding by the moon’s far side at an altitude of only 158 miles, the crew of Apollo 13 were, at the time, one of only a handful of humans to ever gaze upon this strange and relatively-unknown terrain of our closest neighbor. Because the moon is tidally locked, a phenomenon in which an orbiting body takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its partner, only one side ever faces the Earth.
Using imagery collected by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, NASA has recreated views observed by Apollo 13 during the crew’s harrowing 25-minute journey around the moon’s far side.
“This video showcases visualizations in 4K resolution of many of those lunar surface views, starting with earthset and sunrise, and concluding with the time Apollo 13 reestablished radio contact with Mission Control,” the agency said in a release. “Also depicted is the path of the free return trajectory around the Moon, and a continuous view of the Moon throughout that path. All views have been sped up for timing purposes — they are not shown in ‘real-time.'”
This video uses data gathered from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft to recreate some of the stunning views of the Moon that the Apollo 13 astronauts saw on their perilous journey around the farside in 1970. These visualizations, in 4K resolution, depict many different views of the lunar surface, starting with earthset and sunrise and concluding with the time Apollo 13 reestablished radio contact with Mission Control. Also depicted is the path of the free return trajectory around the Moon, and a continuous view of the Moon throughout that path. All views have been sped up for timing purposes — they are not shown in “real-time.” Credits: Data Visualization by: Ernie Wright (USRA) Video Produced & Edited by: David Ladd (USRA) Music provided by Universal Production Music: “Visions of Grandeur” – Frederick Wiedmann
According to Lowell, despite the astronauts’ extremely close proximity, the moon was not the most awe-inspiring scene outside the spacecraft window.
“The impression I got up there wasn’t what the moon looked like so close up, but what the Earth looked like,” he said.
“The lunar flights give you a correct perception of our existence. You look back at Earth from the moon and you can put your thumb up to the window and hide the Earth behind your thumb. Everything you’ve ever known is behind your thumb, and that blue-and-white ball is orbiting a rather normal star, tucked away on the outer edge of a galaxy. You realize how insignificant we really all are. Everything you’ve ever known — all those arguments and wars — is right behind your thumb.”
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Did you watch the video? It’s amazing and is literally the dark side of the moon!
Apollo 13 was the seventh crewed mission in the Apollo space program and the third meant to land on the Moon. The craft was launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank in the service module (SM) failed two days into the mission. The crew instead looped around the Moon, and returned safely to Earth on April 17. The mission was commanded by Jim Lovell with Jack Swigert as command module (CM) pilot and Fred Haise as lunar module (LM) pilot. Swigert was a late replacement for Ken Mattingly, who was grounded after exposure to rubella.
Accidental ignition of damaged wire insulation inside the oxygen tank as it was being routinely stirred caused an explosion that vented the tank’s contents. Without oxygen, needed both for breathing and for generating electric power, the SM’s propulsion and life support systems could not operate. The CM’s systems had to be shut down to conserve its remaining resources for reentry, forcing the crew to transfer to the LM as a lifeboat. With the lunar landing canceled, mission controllers worked to bring the crew home alive.
Although the LM was designed to support two men on the lunar surface for two days, Mission Control in Houston improvised new procedures so it could support three men for four days. The crew experienced great hardship caused by limited power, a chilly and wet cabin and a shortage of potable water. There was a critical need to adapt the CM’s cartridges for the carbon dioxide removal system to work in the LM; the crew and mission controllers were successful in improvising a solution. The astronauts’ peril briefly renewed interest in the Apollo program; tens of millions watched the splashdown in the South Pacific Ocean by television.
An investigative review board found fault with preflight testing of the oxygen tank and the fact that Teflon was placed inside it. The board recommended changes, including minimizing the use of potentially combustible items inside the tank; this was done for Apollo 14. The story of Apollo 13 has been dramatized several times, most notably in the 1995 film Apollo 13.
Learning from Dogs 