how now brownpau
A couple of weekends ago, we visited Luray Caverns, the largest and most popular of Virginia’s many commercial show caves. Luray is about 90 miles west of DC, just off the junction of Routes US340 and US211. The drive there took about an hour and a half.
I love going to the dollar store. There’s always, always, always something amazing.
Third Avenue: Only the Strong Survive, a 1980 DCTV documentary chronicling the struggles of urban life for six New Yorkers. Found via pbump.
Baltimore: Anatomy of an American City, from the Al Jazeera documentary series “Fault Lines.”
Non-Stop Dubai [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4] — Seattle KING5 Evening Magazine Travel Feature.
Chaos on Bullshit Mountain, Daily Show critique of Fox “News” propaganda following the Mother Jones video leak of Romney’s ill-informed 47% speech.
One of the worst lines in movie history, from the 1978 scifi camp classic “Starcrash.” Also see Christopher Plummer’s delivery of “HALT THE FLOW OF TIME,” from the same film.
The ocean is awesome and for winners — 30 Rock.
Our cat Pandora had a seizure last night.
Speaking of Curiosity, JPL has made Spacecraft 3D, an augmented reality app for iOS that projects a simulated Mars rover onto your camera view. Just print out the 3D marker (embedded in the app and emailable from there as a PDF), place it on a flat surface, and point the camera at it with the app running.
On November 26th, 2011 — the Saturday after Thanksgiving — NASA JPL’s Mars Science Laborotary, AKA “Curiosity,” lifted off on an Atlas V (541) rocket. It was a familiar sight — almost the same rocket configuration as we had watched launch at the Juno NASA Tweetup, minus one solid booster. (The difference was that Juno had launched on a 551 configuration. While MSL would reach Mars in 8 months, Juno wouldn’t arrive at Jupiter till 2016.)
Curiosity arrived at Mars on August 6th, 2012, its EDL (Entry, Descent and Landing) process consisting of multiple steps: heat-shielded reentry, supersonic parachute, powered rocket descent stage, and finally a skycrane to gently deliver the rover to the surface before the descent stage then departed to crash elsewhere. JPL showed a 3D simulation of EDL and the rover’s overall mission:
On landing night, I watched from home, rapt with awe, running the NASA EYES MSL simulation in one window and NASA TV feed in another.
EDL went pretty much flawlessly, with much jubilation from Mission Control. The words to listen for were “Tango Delta Nominal.”
On the way down, the Mars Descent Imager captured about five frames per second, recording the rover’s downward view from heatshield separation till touchdown. Bard Canning’s heavily post-processed HD-interpolated MARDI video has gotten a lot of buzz, but my personal favorite is still Doug Ellison’s earlier MARDI sequence roughly synced to audio from JPL Mission Control.
The MARDI sequence even captured the rover’s ejected heat shield hitting the surface.
Meanwhile, Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter soared overhead, its HiRISE camera capturing amazing photos of the reentry stage descending by parachute, and later all the hardware that had crashed to the Martian ground around the rover itself. (See also MRO HiRISE’s past capture of the Phoenix Mars Lander.)
Within minutes of landing the first image had arrived from Curiosity’s Rear Hazcam: a B/W fisheye view of the Martian soil, with what may have been the smoke plume from the crashing descent stage. “It’s the wheel!” was the cry that pierced over the celebration at Mission Control.
That was 48 days ago — or 47 Sols on Mars, where each day is about 40 minutes longer than on Earth. Mars rover engineers and scientists live on this adjusted schedule, coming in to work 40 minutes later every day. Lead flight director David Oh even lived on Mars Time with his whole family, and Curiosity rover driver Matt Heverly uses the Mars Clock app to keep track of when to go to work.
![Focusing the 100-millimeter Mastcam [detail]](https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8285/7881867862_d0e33b1c87.jpg)
Sol 13 Curiosity Mastcam image via NASA GSFC
Since landing, Curiosity has stretched its turret and robot arm, tested its cameras, driven about 260 meters, and examined two rocks en route to its first primary scientific waypoint, Glenelg Intrigue. Powered by an MMRTG with a plutonium core, Curiosity is scheduled to run through its main science mission over about two earth years — though the MMRTG may last as much as double that, if not more.
It’s an awesome robotic planetary adventure I’ll be watching with great interest for however long it goes. Which reminds me, I should check back on MER Opportunity once in a while.
It’s been a while since our last visit to Bartholdy Park near the US Botanic Gardens; we don’t live in the immediate area anymore, and for the past few years much of the park and its iconic fountain have been walled off for restoration work. Sunday after church we dropped by to check out the area.
The walls are gone and Bartholdy Fountain and the rest of the park have been restored to their former glory, an oasis of literally vegetative relaxation amidst near-Southwest DC.
We also dropped by Mitsitam Cafe at NMAI for a bite, and stopped at NASM to see Neil Armstrong’s gloves — which turned out to be on display at the Chantilly annex, not the Mall building. Oops.
Instead we went to the National Gallery to see some Dutch portrait prints from the library and take one last look at the still life paintings of Willem Van Aelst exhibit.
On the way we discovered that one of many posthumous casts of Rodin’s Thinker lives in the National Gallery ground floor sculpture galleries, along with the somewhat whimsical Actaeon by Paul Manship.
Saturday. We’re halfway to New York City on an NJ Transit bus. To our left is Newark, to our right the brown marshes and post-industrial blight of the Meadowlands, and beyond, the gleaming Manhattan skyline peeks out over a hill, and over it all, the new WTC Tower, still unfinished, its cranes raised like the spindly arms of some stick figure cartoon. I try to get a picture, but there’s a special difficulty to taking photos from a bus speeding across the Meadowlands; in motion the real visual density of the place becomes apparent. Every moment, a different obstacle passes by — trucks, power line towers, rocky outcrops, trees, signs, toll plazas, bridges, Secaucus Junction, all passing by just as you hit the shutter.
This August 23rd marked one year since the Virginia earthquake of 2011. It wasn’t a huge earthquake compared to others I’d been in, but for this area it was practically historic.
