Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Phoenix has found ice on Mars:

June 19, 2008 — Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

“It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do that.”

You can see an image here. Awesome.

This is pretty historic. The US has hopes of putting a man on Mars sometime in the 2030 time frame (well after a return to the moon). Water on Mars will likely have an impact on how that mission is designed, and possibly it’s success.

Mars has ice caps, that’s been known for a long time. Subterranean ice was suspected, and now confirmed.

Asa’s got a blog post about Firefox 2 being used at NASA for the Mars Phoenix Lander.

Bonus: on a Mac.

When you’ve got to visit foreign worlds, and demand the best, Firefox and Mac OS X deliver.

I noticed this last night, but apparently I wasn’t the only one as Robert Gale over at A Welsh View and Digg also agree that this is one amazing picture of the shuttle launch. The comments on Digg also point out a few other pictures from this and another launch that are similar, as well as pinpoint (by Google Maps) where the pic was taken.

Of course NASA has more, including some in high resolution. Something about a rocket at night makes for some great pictures.

NASA is reporting that the Genesis capsule’s parachute didn’t open as planned, resulting in it tumbling to the ground and impacting at what FoxNews is reporting on TV as 100 MPH. Probable damage, but no word on the status of the payload (about the size of a few grains of salt). NASA does have video of the decent (helicopters were present as they were supposed to snag it), showing it tumbling and spinning. Some eerie pictures are being shown now. Amazing how red the dirt it landed in looks. It’s like a Martian impact.

Damn

Take a look at this beautiful picture of a Supernova as taken by the Hubble Telescope. Just amazing.

Stuff like this makes me realize how I need to take my old telescope out of the basement on a clear night. Just so much effort to take out… but lots of fun.