Author Archives: The Art Of Vikki

Music – We can’t all be a Mars rover

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August 17, 2012 10:00 am
Good Morning Curiosity – Wake up With the Same Songs as a Mars Rover

Hopefully, Curiosity will never wake up on the wrong side of Mars, then we’d have trouble finding her.

There’s a long history of waking up astronauts with songs. Last year, NASA archivist Colin Fries listed every song played to astronauts in the space program he could find.

Turns out, Curiosity gets wakeup songs too. The Curiosity team answered questions on Reddit recently, and one user asked: “Does Curiosity get wake-up songs every morning like the other Mars rovers got? If so, what have some of the songs been so far?” Answer: “Yup! She tends to be less cranky with a good wakeup song.”

So far, the songs have been as follows.

Sol 2: “Good Morning Good Morning” Beatles, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club

Sol 3: “Good morning, good morning” from Singing in the Rain.

Sol 5: Wagner “The ride of the valkyries” R10 Victory Song: Theme from Mission Impossible

Sol 6: “Got the Time” by Anthrax, and “Echelon” by 30 Seconds to Mars

Sol 7: The Doors – “Break on Through”, and George Harrison – “Got My Mind Set on You”

Sol 8: Theme from Star Wars by John Williams

Sol 9: “Wake Up Little Susie” by Simon and Garfunkel

Sol 10: Frank Sinatra “Come Fly with Me”

The “Sol” markers there indicate Martian days. Mars Rover Soundtrack, the site that listed the songs played to the Spirit rover that landed on the planet in 2004, explains:

The Mars rover engineering team works on Mars time. A martian day, also called a “sol”, is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. Each martian morning as the rover wakes up they play a song related to the events of the upcoming sol. Occasionally a second or third song is played during the sol in addition to the wakeup song. This is a tradition from the manned space program. Unfortunately robotic probes are not yet capable of feeling inspiration from music, but Mission Control is.

Right, so Curiosity doesn’t have ears. And the engineers didn’t rig her with speakers to play our tunes to the aliens she meets. So the songs really ring through mission control.  Continue reading →

Perseid Meteor Shower This Weekend

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It’s not the Leonids, but it’s way warmer. ~ theartofvikki

Perseid Meteor Shower 2012: Annual ‘Shooting Star’ Show To Hit Night Sky This Weekend
Posted: 08/10/2012 1:39 pm Updated: 08/10/2012 1:58 pm

NASA astronaut Ron Garan took this photograph during the Perseid meteor shower on Aug. 13, 2011 from the International Space Station.

This is the weekend of the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower and most meteor forecasts predict the annual “shooting star” display will be at its best during the overnight hours of late Saturday (Aug. 11) into the early Sunday.

The Perseid meteor shower occurs each year in late July and early August when the Earth passes through the dusty remains of the comet Swift-Tuttle. In the night sky, the meteor shower appears to radiate out of the constellation Perseus, hence, its name: Perseid meteor shower. Continue reading →

Mars NASA Rover Curiosity Landing Party!

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Less than two weeks to go. The newest Mars Rover, Curiosity, is slated to land on the Red Planet August 5, 2012 at 10:31 pm PDT [1:31 am EDT August 6th]

Detailed information and countdown clock at NASA’s Mars site http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/

Whether you stay up late into the night on the 5th…

Mars Rover Landing Party Supplies

…or celebrate the next day…

Mars Rover Landing Party Supplies

It’s an excellent excuse to host a Mars Party.

The Science Channel has scheduled a special on the landing Monday August 6th at 9:00 pm EDT. I hope it starts with CURIOSITY MADE IT! :)

Chinese Zombie Attack!

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Chinese Zombie Attack: Drunken man leaps upon, eats woman’s face

The zombie attacks aren’t left to just the American south. China has decided to jump on the enraged-person-eats-face bandwagon. Drunk Chinese bus driver, Dong, blocked the path of motorist Du. Du steps out. Dong attacks and eats Du’s face. Sometimes the headlines, they write themselves. Continue reading →

This Is The Life On Mars

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Life on Mars: here’s what it looks like
July 9, 2012 – 5:47PM
Nicky Phillips

A section of the NASA shot of Mars. See the full scale picture on NASA’s site Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State University
This is about as good a view of Mars most people will ever see.
NASA has released a panoramic scene, compiled of 817 images, of the Red Planet.
The images were taken by a mast-mounted panoramic camera on the US space agency’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity between December 2011 and May 2012 when the rover was stationary for maintenance during the Martian winter.
NASA described the picture as the “next best thing to being there”.

The image shows new rover tracks and an old impact crater, known as the Endeavour Crater, which can be seen just below the horizon in the right half of the picture. It spans 22 kilometres in diameter.
The rover’s solar panels and deck can be seen in the foreground.
Opportunity, which has been working on Mars since January 2004, completed its 3000th Martian day on July 2, when the US space agency marked 15 years of robotic presence on the Red Planet.
NASA’s Curiosity rover, formally known as the Mars Science Laboratory but nicknamed a “dream machine” by NASA scientists, blasted off from Florida in November and is expected to land in early August.
It is the most advanced machine ever built with the aim of roaming the surface of Earth’s nearest neighbour. The rover cost $2.5 billion to construct and launch, carries its own rock-analysing lab and aims to hunt for signs that life once existed there.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/life-on-mars-heres-what-it-looks-like-20120709-21re0.html

Curiosity Rover Mars Landing Party In August! August 6th is the current projected date. Who’s with me?

Baltic Sea UFO

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‘UFO’ at the bottom of the Baltic Sea ‘cuts off electrical equipment when divers get within 200m’
– Object is raised about 10 to 13ft above seabed and curved at the sides like a mushroom
– Hole is surrounded by an strange rock formation that expedition team can not explain
– Stones are covered in something ‘resembling soot’ which has baffled experts
– Divers say phones and some cameras switch off when close to the object
By EDDIE WRENN
UPDATED: 01:26 EST, 27 June 2012

The divers exploring a ‘UFO-shaped’ object at the bottom of the Baltic Sea say their equipment stops working when they approach within 200m.
Professional diver Stefan Hogerborn, part of the Ocean X team which is exploring the anomaly, said some of the team’s cameras and the team’s satellite phone would refuse to work when directly above the object, and would only work once they had sailed away.
He is quoted as saying: ‘Anything electric out there – and the satellite phone as well – stopped working when we were above the object.
‘And then we got away about 200 meters and it turned on again, and when we got back over the object it didn’t work.’

Hefty trajectory: The Swedish diving team noted a 985-foot flattened out ‘runway’ leading up to the object, implying that it skidded along the path before stopping but no true answers are clear
Diver Peter Lindberg said: ‘We have experienced things that I really couldn’t imagine and I have been the team’s biggest skeptic regarding these different kind of theories.
‘I was kind of prepared just to find a stone or cliff or outcrop or pile of mud but it was nothing like that, so for me it has been a missing experience I must say.’
Member Dennis Åsberg said: ‘I am one hundred percent convinced and confident that we have found something that is very, very, very unique.  Continue reading →

Does Italian Crop Circle Depict 2012

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New Crop Circle in Italy Depicts Planets and Constellations on December 2012

2012?

A crop circle has been reported in Santena near Poirino, Italy on June 17th, 2012.

View more photos here:
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/inter2012/italy/Santena2012a.html
This crop circle depicts apparent references to planetary orbits. According to crop circle researcher Dr. Horace R. Drew the positions of the objects in the crop circle reference the future dates of December 21st to 28th, 2012. Below is Drew’s analysis of the formation:  Continue reading →