efaardvark
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Status Updates posted by efaardvark
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Awesome. Especially the part with the two side boosters coming back in formation to land at the Cape. I could watch a loop of that sequence all day...
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Well, Beresheet went splat (crunch? <insert sound of lithobreaking spacecraft here>), but we still have the Falcon Heavy launch/landings to look forward to.
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It seems tomorrow is the day for landings. I'm working swings batting cleanup (hopefully) for Israel's lunar landing so I have to go to work and focus on work things at 3PM, but today's falcon heavy launch was scrubbed due to weather and rescheduled for 3:35PM tomorrow! Hopefully SpaceIL will take their first landing opportunity and land just before 1PM so I get a few minutes after reaching my office to at least watch the FH side boosters land in formation back at the Cape. That sight never gets old.
(Previous FH "Starman" launch below. Hope tomorrow's is at least as smooth. Last time they lost the booster that tried to land on the barge. Can they recover 3 of 3 this time?)
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Christening a new shot glass tonight. Not a big drinker - actually pretty lightweight when it comes to drinking in fact - but the booze seemed appropriate to the artwork on the glass. And of course it is Friday sooo.. why not? Cheers!
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The glamorous world of "realtime" space flight operations: manually copying a bunch of (year) 2004 data from a bunch of DVDs back onto the system for the SPITZER project (aka SIRTF).
(For those wondering.. yes, that's linux.. Gnome, CentOS 7, kernel 3.10, on generic Dell/x86_64. Not exactly cutting edge, but it gets the job done.)
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QuoteIs that your desktop?
@LonelyPoet My boss would say yes. However, the cable monster that lives behind the monitors would probably disagree.
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It is that itchy-eyed, runny-nose, yellow-tinged time of the year again here in SoCal.. <achoo!>
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Tell me about it. My car is coated with it. Even the air has a yellow tinge. When the wind blows through the pine trees it looks like banks of yellow fog drifting thru. We need some real rain to wash it all away but instead we're supposed to be getting some (more) strong winds tonight that'll just stir it up. I need a space suit. Probably gonna have to take some benadryl tonight when I get home and just crash.
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Excalibur's version of LA's Medieval Times.. jousting, sword fighting, and horsemanship while eating a chicken with your hands.
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Still no free time, but at least taxes are finally done. Hopefully I'll have an hour or two this weekend for some games or anime. Been so busy I haven't even had time to stop at the library* & replenish my reading stack either.
(*yes, libraries still exist!)
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Got my first tank of gas for the new car. Still had a third of a tank so I didn't really need to but I'm going to "Lost Wages" (Las Vegas) for my brother's wedding next week and I thought it would be a good idea to familiarize myself with the process and top off the tank before the trip.
Car said 1,225 miles and ~181mpg on what I'd used so far (=since October). Topping it off took 7 gallons.. $23 at California gasoline prices. Sweet.
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'The instantaneous launch window opens at 2:49 a.m. EST, or 7:49 UTC, and a backup instantaneous launch opportunity is available on Tuesday, March 5 at 1:38 a.m. EST, or 6:38 UTC. Following stage separation, SpaceX will attempt to land Falcon 9’s first stage on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.'
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Molten salt nuclear fission is one of my favorite technologies that actually exist. If there's such a thing as steampunk nuclear, this is it. The guys at ORNL actually built one way back in the 50s. (1954 to be precise.) No high-tech here, at least by modern standards. Too bad Verne didn't know about it. Forget coal and sodium.. make the Nautilus nuke-powered!
https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2019/nuclear-goes-retro-much-greener-outlook -
Sliced my thumb on one hand AND stabbed a finger on the other in two separate incidents while cutting up a cardboard box. Normally not this clumsy but today... just put the knife down and walk away.
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It is snowing at Goldstone (California desert)!
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The thing about deserts is that there is no water. There is no water in the air to make clouds or fog so the sun hits the ground full-force and heats everything up. If there were water on the ground, either in the ground or in standing bodies or even in plants, then it could evaporate and cool things off a little, but there isn't.
One other thing that water vapor in the air does is trap heat at the ground. Since deserts have no water, at night all that heat collected during the day gets lost back to space. It is not at all unusual for the temperature in a desert to go from below freezing before dawn to over 100F by noon.
Snow in the desert is pretty unusual though. In my area the deserts are deserts because mountains along the coast block all the moisture from the ocean from getting inland to the deserts. Lately however we've had strong winds pushing very cold, wet air over the mountains into the deserts. We've been getting lots of rain on our side of the mountains as well, but conditions on the desert side this time turned it into snow instead. Definitely unusual.
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Probably not likely. Anything that blows in would have to deal with the desert conditions & coming from wetter areas they'd likely die. Unless this is more of a permanent weather change of course.
There are plants that are already there and adapted to the desert however. Usually they lay low most of the time, waiting for the infrequent rains. When the water does come, there's an explosion of activity as they do their thing while they have access to the water. Some desert plants have seeds that can last for hundreds of years, then sprout, grow, flower, go to seed, and die in the course of a couple days or a week, and desert blooms are often quite impressive, though hard to catch.
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So back in October a tree fell on my old car, a 2007-vintage Prius hybrid, necessitating the purchase of a new car. I liked the old one a lot, but I always wished it'd had the option of charging the battery to function more like an electric vehicle. I'm not sold on EV's due to the so-called range anxiety, and EVs are still pretty expensive anyway, so I didn't want a full EV just yet. (I'm not actually worried about the range so much as the recharging times. I'm always thinking of those people on the east cost when hurricane Sandy hit and everyone was told to evacuate at least 500 miles inland to avoid flooding and high winds. People with gas cars could manage it, but even the best EVs can only go a few hundred miles before needing several hours to fully recharge. Doh!)
So anyway my new car is a also a hybrid, but this one is pluggable, with an electric range range that is plenty to cover the commute before the gas engine kicks in and it starts behaving more like my old car. If I plug it in overnight at least every other day I pretty much never need gas, and I've been pretty good about plugging it in. I'm approaching the 1,000-mile mark on the odometer and just recently dropped below the halfway point on the tank of gas I got from the dealership when I bought the car.
Yep.. driving daily since October and I haven't had to visit a gas station even once!
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Valentine's day viewing choices...
[mal type=anime id=14289]
or maybe
[mal type=anime id=2476]
Decisions, decisions.....
JK... I went with 好きっていいなよ
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Looks like that's it for the Opportunity Mars rover. Not a bad way to go though... taken out by a global dust storm - the biggest ever recorded - 15 years into a 90-day mission.
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"Opportunity" did manage to collect some data and transmit some pictures (like this and this) before it had to shut down to conserve battery power..
The "Curiosity" rover also collected a bunch of pictures and other data. It is nuke-powered so it didn't have any trouble surviving the storm. There are also several spacecraft orbiting Mars that were collecting data during the storm. This was the first (known) global dust storm since the 70s so the scientists were really interested in bringing all their instruments to bear and getting as much data as possible on this storm.
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