ad astra!

Since suggestive search is pretty standard now, I though I’d try what the various search engines’ suggestions for “why…”

The results are quite interesting. (click for bigger)

The second lunar landing, of the LM Intrepid was 40 years ago today, manned by Pete Conrad and Alan Bean (with Gemini 11’s Richard Gordon orbiting in the CSM Yankee Clipper). The science and achievement was of course amazing, but the best part (I think) of the whole mission is that the backup crew managed to insert reduced sized pictures of Playboy centerfolds into the mission checklists attached to the wrists of Conrad’s and Bean’s spacesuits.

Porn. On the Moon. Way to go, guys.

Or as Pete Conrad put it: “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me!”

More: NASA – Apollo 12
NASA’s Apollo 12 Lunar Surface Journal

Still my heart and hold my tongue
I feel my time, my time has come
Let me in, unlock the door
I never felt this way before

And the wheels just keep on turning
The drummer begins to drum
I don’t know which way I’m going
I don’t know which way I’ve come

Hold my head inside your hands
I need someone who understands
I need someone, someone who hears
For you I’ve waited all these years

For you I’d wait ’til kingdom come
Until my day my day is done
And say you’ll come and set me free
Just say you’ll wait you’ll wait for me

In your tears and in your blood
In your fire and in your flood
I hear you laugh I heard you sing
I wouldn’t change a single thing

The wheels just keep on turning
The drummers begin to drum
I don’t know which way I’m going
I don’t know what I’ve become

For you I’d wait ’til kingdom come
Until my days my days are done
Say you’ll come and set me free
Just say you’ll wait, you’ll wait for me

Just say you’ll wait, you’ll wait for me
Just say you’ll wait, you’ll wait for me

For Carl’s birthday, an image he didn’t live to see:

A recent photo from the Cassini spacecraft shows the mighty planet Saturn, and if you look very closely between its wing-like rings, a faint pinprick of light. That tiny dot is Earth bustling with life as we know it. The image is the second ever taken of our world from deep space. The first, captured by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990, stunned many people, including the famous astronomer Carl Sagan who called our seemingly miniscule planet a “pale blue dot” and “the only home we’ve ever known.”

His full quote:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home, That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam… There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

I’ve been scouring the internet for the longest time trying to find the source of the default iPhone wallpaper that depicts the globe of Earth from space, featuring North America:

Last night I finally gave up, and in doing so found it serendipitously tonight, here, courtesy of the TERRA satellite.

Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite, MODIS provides an integrated tool for observing a variety of terrestrial, oceanic, and atmospheric features of the Earth. The land and coastal ocean portions of these images are based on surface observations collected from June through September 2001 and combined, or composited, every eight days to compensate for clouds that might block the sensor’s view of the surface on any single day.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/BlueMarble_2002.php

Enceladus is an icy moon of Saturn. This morning the Cassini probe made its closest flyby yet, at an altitude of about 64 miles (103km). Here’s some of the very first “raw” images from the flyby, showcasing the cryovulcanism (per the wikipedia, “rather than molten rock, these volcanoes erupt volatiles such as water, ammonia or methane”) that creates spectacular plumes spewing off the tiny moon as well as the cracked and frozen surface of the moon.

More:
Enceladus Flyby Overview
Main NASA/JPL Cassini site
NASA’s Solar System Exploration page about Enceladus
A really spectacular picture from 2007
Enceladus in the wikipedia