LAUNCH ALERTBrevard County, Florida ping.
Let me know if you want on or off this ping list.
(not associated with the county government)
Looks like a go for today.
ET doesn’t like us nosing around on Mars - will the lab land safely, or...?
Yawn, when they start building Saturn V’s again wake me up.
LAUNCH ALERTAny TV covering the launch?
According to one ancient legend, a Chinese official named Wan-Hoo attempted a flight to the moon using a large wicker chair to which were fastened 47 large rockets. Forty seven assistants, each armed with torches, rushed forward to light the fuses. In a moment there was a tremendous roar accompanied by billowing clouds of smoke. When the smoke cleared, the flying chair and Wan-Hoo were gone.
Ise gotts da chair. There are syrplus Fourth of July rockets. Maybe Obluster would like to be the first prez in space!
ping
Now in the 6 minute burn. Everything is nominal. Whew!
bump
NASA’s latest Mars mission takes off on Saturday carrying a huge array of high-tech tools. Critical to its success is a cutting-edge water detector built by Russian scientists.
RT's Darya Pushkover has been to meet the people behind the device.
The Red Planet has been a source of wild flights of imagination and of scientific speculation for centuries. Getting there has never been easy – many missions have failed.
But hopes are high for the new rover. It is called “Curiosity” and it is due on Mars next year.
Engineer Aleksey Bitulev told RT that the heart of the device is a tiny tube that produces neutrons capable of penetrating up to one meter below the planet’s surface. And Sergey Sholeninov, head of the design team, added that the challenge was to accommodate the device on board a spacecraft.
“We were not only limited in weight – it also has to endure all the hardships of interplanetary flight.”
DAN’s second half is a hydrogen detector, which will act as the probe’s aqua navigator.
“The rover is like a small car, and our device is placed on it like headlights,” Mitrofanov explained. “So as the pulsing neutron generator shoots, neutrons go under the ground, and feel their way under. If liquid or frozen water is there, it can then be measured with our detector.”
And the Rover comes fully-loaded: 17 high-definition cameras, aluminium wheels that can be steered independently, a mounted laser to vaporize rock and a robotic arm to drill and scoop up samples, among other instruments. Under the hood: a nuclear-powered engine to give it a top crawling speed of five centimeters per second.
Read more at: Russia Today