Friday, March 29, 2013

Weekly Rundown

 A FIRST FOR ASTRONAUTS
  What is being called the “express” flight to the ISS (International Space Station), has delivered three new residents after a six hour flight. Definitely better than two days, that’s for sure.  The Russian rocket was carrying one astronaut from Nasa, Chris Cassidy, and two cosmonauts, Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin. They’ll remain on board until September. And you think getting to work is bad? These guys will be up for twenty hours before settling in to the station. 
What took so long to get things moving like this? We should have been here years ago. I think we need to work on launching time as well. Even with an escape capsule, if it was out as well, it just takes us too long to get off the ground in case of an emergency. 
The second link is to a set of pictures of launch and approach. Pretty cool to look at. Watching live would have been better, but I wasn't paying attention.




GREEN METEORITE?
            What is interesting about this as well, is that it may well be from Mercury. The study and meteorite NWA7325 were unveiled this month by Meteorite scientist Anthony Irving at the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
            It is a group of 35 meteorites found in morocco in 2012. They have estimated the age at 4.56 billion years.
            The article is really interesting and very informative. I’d say a must read for anyone into this area. The technical details are just too long and too many to get into here on a rundown.  It explains how they try and tell where meteorites are from originally.


FOR APOLLO 11 FANS (which I'm sure here is everyone)
            And for the last of the actual science news this week, I stumbled across an interesting video. If you ever need a reminder of what space exploration is all about, or just one of those days where you want to watch Apollo 11 again, I think I found a quick spot. The entire video is 153 seconds long. Its title is “APOLLO 11 IN 100 SECONDS.”
            And the best part is, it pretty well does it as well. It’s a fast frame video, meaning that some scenes are only one second long. But they are in a perfect usage basically of what was happening at the moment, and fit into the original words of the astronauts, ground crew, etc. Most are longer of course as it is a video of moments during prelaunch to end.
            And there are a lot of other space videos there as well. Just hit the "see all" at the top of the screen. There were only 78 videos total when I was there today. Not all are space of course, but there are quite a few. There is also a link on the page that will take you to a site that sells dvd sets of the Apollo missions, etc. 


INDEPENDENCE DAY AND WOLVERINE
            Two things of some interest here this week. One I am sure most have already seen, or at least know about, but if not here is the trailer for the new International Wolverine Movie, titled, “The Wolverine.” Seriously, what else needs to be said in the title. 
 

            Turns out Roland Emmerich is planning on two sequels to “Independence Day.” Well, he certainly waited long enough, but it sounds like it is going to be good thing.
            The movies will be follow ups that are taking place around 20 years after Independence Day. They are being called "ID Forever Part 1" and "ID Forever Part 2.”
            As for Will Smith coming back it is doubtful. He says that Will has gotten too big for this kind of movie, and it isn't a Will Smith movie. It’s a group thing.
            The first link is to the article, and the second will be to the IMDb page about “ID Forever, Part 1.” To sum it up quickly, Dean Devlin was paid for a sequel originally, wrote it, and gave the money back because it couldn’t live up to the first film. Check it out, it’s in the Did You Know section there. 



            Been an interesting week. Hope you enjoyed the rundown. 

1 comment:

Beam Me Up said...

well done Kall! Good Length and each article held my attention. Not to bad record it either. All round, it was and is a great!