@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

marsroverdriver

@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social

On a small red light in the night sky lives hundreds of pounds of thinking metal sent from Earth. I used to tell it what to do.

Opinions mine. He/him.

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marsroverdriver, to random
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

A major driver for belief in conspiracy theories, I think, is a very natural and understandable deep human need for mystery. Which is why articles like this are great: no, aliens didn't abduct your uncle, but there really is a rectangular red galaxy 2300 light years away and another galaxy shaped like a doughnut and the strong possibility of a planet in our very own solar system that we just haven't found yet. Here, let me tell you about them.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/the-nine-most-mysterious-objects-in-the-universe (via @adafruit)

marsroverdriver, to space
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

Six decades too late, Ed Dwight made it to #space. But here, as in many things, better late than never. Ad astra, Captain Dwight.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=2025415

marsroverdriver, to space
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

Hot fucking damn.
https://hackaday.com/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/ #space

marsroverdriver, to random
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

This is surely among the most amazing engineering feats of all time. It had better go into the Guinness Book of World Records for longest-distance debugging session. My hat's off!
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/nasa-engineers-discover-why-voyager-1-is-sending-a-stream-of-gibberish-from-outside-our-solar-system

(And by "world records," I guess I mean "solar system records." But it doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way.)

fkamiah17, to UKpolitics
@fkamiah17@toot.wales avatar

Over to you, Police Scotland. Please make this happen.

Times: "JK Rowling challenges police: Arrest me under Scottish hate crime law
Author and activist defiant over posts calling trans women men"

https://archive.is/LcNSn

#TransRightsAreHumanRights #UKPolitics

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@fkamiah17 I simply can't understand JK Rowling's weird hatred for those who are different from herself. Has she not read her own books?

glennf, (edited ) to random
@glennf@twit.social avatar

Wowzers! Thank you all who participated, promoted, or gave support and comfort! (And 40+ hours to go!) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/glennf/how-comics-were-made

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@glennf Yay, congratulations! Now for the hard part. ;-) ;-)

marsroverdriver, to space
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

Well, yes, that's not good for a helicopter, no matter what planet it's on.

That'll do, #MarsHelicopter #Ingenuity. That'll do.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/final-images-of-ingenuity-reveal-an-entire-blade-broke-off-the-helicopter/#p3 #space

BlackAzizAnansi, to KindActions
@BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to avatar

Another mutual aid request, please share ❤️

https://www.gofundme.com/f/little-amelia-amy-ferguson?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer

#mutualaid @mutualaid

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi @mutualaid Well, that's just perfectly awful in every way. Thank you for letting us know about this. Donated.

marsroverdriver, to space
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

In ancient Rome, when they wanted to punish a group of soldiers, they killed one-tenth of the group, with the unfortunate soldiers chosen by lottery. (They were usually killed by the survivors.) Hence our word "decimate."

Tomorrow, JPL is to be, in round numbers, decimated -- both in that ancient sense and in the more common modern one ("devastated"). There is no way to do this without causing real pain, losing irreplaceable people. This is simply horrible.

https://spacenews.com/jpl-to-lay-off-8-of-workforce/

isomeme, to history
@isomeme@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

"[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

-- Socrates slams TikTokbooks in the Phaedrus, ca. 370 BCE

#History

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@isomeme I just brought up this quote to a friend of mine a week ago, when she was griping about something about her daughter's kindergarten class. "This is exactly the kind of thing our parents' generation said about us," I observed, "and now that we're old it's our turn." It hit home.

It is always simultaneously comforting and depressing to see how little humans change over time. There is nothing new under the sun, etc.

BlackAzizAnansi, (edited ) to random
@BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to avatar

What's your favorite story about one of your family members?

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi My Jewish grandfather fell in love with my Presbyterian grandmother. His family threatened to disown him if he married her. He did and they did, and he never said a word about it. My brother and I found out we were 1/4 Jewish only after he died.

He and my grandmother moved to rural Waycross, Georgia and opened a pro-integration newspaper -- in the 1950s. One night the Klan came to burn a cross on their lawn, so my grandmother held them off with a shotgun until the FBI came.

leonerd, to random
@leonerd@fosstodon.org avatar

Does anyone know if any of the #Mars vehicles are running any #Perl code? No particular reason, I'm just curious for something...

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@amoroso @leonerd Onboard? I'm afraid not: flight software is basically always C, with some very limited C++ here and there.

On the ground, though, it's a different story. Mark Maimone wrote a fair bit of our downlink processing in Perl, for instance. I myself wrote a lot of Perl, too. Most notably, I wrote MER's automated flight rule checker in Perl. (Sadly, it has since been rewritten in Python, proving that all good things must come to an end. ;-)

marsroverdriver, to space
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

If one of your descent engines falls off and you land upside-down ... and yet you still survive the landing and accomplish nearly all your mission objectives? That's a WIN, my friend. Way to go, SLIM and JAXA! #space
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/a-japanese-spacecraft-faceplanted-on-the-moon-and-lived-to-tell-the-tale/#p3

marsroverdriver, to space
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

The amazing, heroic Mars helicopter is no more. I damn near would have sworn it would never have been able to fly in the first place, and here it is more than 70 flights and three years into its mission, proving me as wrong as wrong can be. And you know what? Sometimes it's nice to be wrong. Farewell and ad astra, Ingenuity. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/after-three-years-on-mars-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-mission-ends/

fraser, to random
@fraser@m.universetoday.com avatar

Solar panels on Earth have several downsides, providing less energy in cloudy weather and none at night. Space is the perfect place for solar power, and scientists have been working on plans for space-based power generation for decades. The problem is that launching satellites's always too expensive compared to just building more panels on the ground. A new NASA report suggests that space-based power might finally be operational sometime in the 2050s.

https://www.nasa.gov/organizations/otps/space-based-solar-power-report/

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@fraser If you put your solar satellite in space, you have to beam the energy down to Earth somehow -- a lot of it. Is there a way to do that that can't be repurposed as a weapon?

marsroverdriver, to space
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

I thought the prospect of a was just bonkers -- and yet, here we are, 70 flights in. So, sure, why not go one notch more bonkers and fly an airplane on Mars? https://bnnbreaking.com/tech/science-tech/nasas-maggie-a-revolutionary-leap-in-mars-exploration/

marsroverdriver, to space
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

#space is big (and I hear Douglas Adams echo in my mind when I type that). It's easy to think of light as fast -- until you stop and reflect that light takes between four and 20 minutes to get from Earth to Mars, depending where they are in their respective orbits. Set a timer for just four minutes ... and do nothing while it ticks down. Really wait.

Or this: a coronal mass ejection (a solar storm) took months to propagate through the solar system.

Space. Is. Big.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8r8376

marsroverdriver, to random
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

I'm a big fan of Mastodon's "private note about this account." I often use it to store the URL of the post that got me to follow someone. Not only is this a rich (if scattered) selection of great links, but also it comes in handy when I ask myself "why am I following this person who is tooting about traffic patterns in Detroit" and it reminds me that they also toot thoughtfully about the political implications of software or something.

mhoye, to random
@mhoye@mastodon.social avatar

It's my third glass of wine so I'd like to propose to you that we turn the 'conscious observer' problem on its head and start asking about phenomena that seem to manifest themselves in the absence of a conscious observer when some interpretation of the model would ostensibly require one, and apply that as a dowsing rod for discovering unanticipated consciousnesses that are perhaps omnipresent but would otherwise be invisible to our limited senses or timescale.

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@isomeme @mhoye I would think that to many people, Many Worlds seems ... not parsimonious, in a way that their general understanding of physics leads them to dislike.

I don't have a dog in the fight, just channeling what I think other people think.

(Or maybe it's their personalities, as opposed to physics itself, that lead them to want what they do, and that same personality also draws them to physics? I dunno.)

marsroverdriver,
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

@mhoye @isomeme Sure, that makes sense, too: it's unsatisfying.

Of course, we have lots of other reasons to think that our subjective experience of consciousness is misleading; there's no reason it couldn't be misleading in this way as well. But yeah, it'll face emotionally based resistance all the same.

marsroverdriver, to random
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

I will say that's a bumper sticker I've never seen before.

marsroverdriver, to random
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

TIL that if you hold down SHIFT while scrolling your mouse's scroll wheel, you scroll side to side instead of up and down. I have been doing the side-to-side scrolling the hard way all these years, as it turns out.

Am I the only one who didn't know this trick?!

marsroverdriver, to random
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

Chris Lewicki ranks among the best engineers I ever worked with, and he's a real nice guy, too. Here's the story of how he damn near killed (what would become) the spacecraft I loved more than any other, before she even launched.

No matter how bad your day was today, it wasn't this bad.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/30/spirit_rover_crash_story/

marsroverdriver, to random
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

One thing I've always loved about the space program is that it's fundamentally hopeful. And one of the most hopeful things we've ever done is to put the Pioneer plaque and Voyager golden record on those spacecraft.

They'll probably never be found by an alien civilization, of course. The odds are, if you'll forgive me, astronomical. But that's part of what makes them hopeful: that's us, venturing blindly into unknown territory, hands extended in friendship.

Ad astra.

https://boingboing.net/2023/11/28/linda-salzman-sagan-co-creator-of-the-voyager-golden-record-and-pioneer-plaque-rip.html

marsroverdriver, to random
@marsroverdriver@deepspace.social avatar

Happy Red Planet Day to all who celebrate!

On this date in 1964, NASA launched the Mariner 4 spacecraft, which performed the first successful flyby of Mars, returning the first close-up pictures of the red planet's surface.

At the same time, whether they knew it or not, NASA also launched the careers of untold thousands of Mars scientists and engineers -- and, let us hope, Mars astronauts.

https://nationaltoday.com/red-planet-day/

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