Giant Freakin Robot

Luckily, my commute to work is only 12 minutes, with a six-mile travel distance. But until my wife and I bought our current house, I was having to drive 26 miles from home to job, taking around 35-40 minutes with no traffic. A lot of people travel much farther and deal with heavier traffic than I do. And I think most of us agree it’s one of the most frustrating non-life-threatening problems out there. Well, let’s all thank our billions of lucky stars that we aren’t in the passenger seat on any of the Rovers that have ever traveled in space. You can only ironically listen to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for so long before wanting to smash your face into the windshield. And yes, I’m aware the Rovers have neither seats nor windshields, nor eight-track players.

Karl Tate of SPACE.com has created an infographic laying out just how far all the Rovers have roved, both on Mars and on the Moon. If I wasn’t familiar with some of this data already, I would have thought hundreds and hundreds of miles would have been traveled, based on absolutely nothing but a childhood of RC cars. Match your predictions with the graphic below.

Remember that guy Leonardo Da Vinci, that old Italian hack that painted religious people and sorta came up with helicopters and all that? I mean, I’m sure he was a cool guy and all — he’s named after a Ninja Turtle, for one — but he used oil paint to produce his “classics.” I mean, how archaic can you get? That’s like saying I walked to my mailbox using a Homo Habilis’ feet. This is 2013. We use lasers for that shit. (Note: I was just joshing up there.)

The elusive smile of the Mona Lisa, arguably Da Vinci’s most famous work, has been beamed by laser to NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a spacecraft that has been going around the Moon since 2009, mapping things and waiting to assist in future lunar excursions. The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer will be the source of that next excursion, and the successful laseriffic communication between land and space “sets the stage for the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration, a high data rate laser-communication-demonstration that will be a central feature” of that mission, said researcher Richard Vondrak of the LRO.

If you thought fax machines were magic when they came out, this is even more amazing. The Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, is where the Next Generation Satellite Laser Ranging station is located. From there, a series of laser signals were sent 240,000 miles to the LRO, which was optimal since it’s followed not only by radio signals but by laser as well. The Mona Lisa was mapped out into pixels and separated into sections that were 150 x 200 pixels each, and were then pulsed out via laser, using a timed system resembling Morse code that adjusted the image’s shading. Once that was complete, the image was sent back to earth using radio signals, and there she was, looking as pristine as something you would get from a fax machine. While that sounds slightly disparaging, it isn’t meant to. Lasers sent a message across that wasn’t, “Hey, look at me, I’m making myself laugh by pointing a laser where someone’s nipple would be if they weren’t wearing a shirt.”

If this were a real horror movie, and not that exercise in plot procrastination that was Apollo 18, then this would be the video holding all the evidence of extraterrestrial life, or, should I say, our new alien god monsters. But instead, all we have are stunning images of the Moon’s surface in a way that we’ve never seen before. So I guess I can let some dust accumulate on my alien god monster shrines for a little while longer.

NASA’s Grail (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) mission was a pair of spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, that circled the Moon and collected detailed lunar gravity measurements for most of 2012, before intentionally crash-landing in December 2012. On December 14th, days prior to nosing into the lunar north pole, the Ebb spacecraft captured the video below, of a brief flyover in the vicinity of the Jackson impact crater, just six miles above the Moon’s surface on the far side. The video is actually comprised of 2,400 individual frames that the scientists had to piece together to make the two videos edited together here.

In my opinion, you can improve pretty much any concept by adding “in space” to the end of it. Birthdays…in space. Water balloon fights…in space. And, of course, food…in space. Because the simply daily act of eating becomes a far more interesting challenge when you can’t rely on your food to stay on the plate, and an unexpected sneeze could send your chicken kiev ricocheting off of sensitive equipment.

We’ve seen all sorts of fascinating things beamed back home from the International Space Station, from a full tour to a demonstration of how water works in microgravity. Now NASA Commander Chris Hadfield has pitched in with a look at what passes for your three hots (cot not included) up on the ISS. First: nachos!