Some guy.
On Sunday, September 24, 2023, a little capsule touched down in the Utah desert. It is the sample return mission from OSIRIS-REx, a space probe that touched down on asteroid 101955 Bennu in October of 2020, and collected a sample to return to Earth. I vaguely remember the touchdown on the asteroid, one of humanity’s […]
Every year, I wish the Linux kernel project a happy birthday, because what would I be using if it didn’t exist (probably macOS). Today is Linux’s 32nd birthday (a nice round number there), and it’s still my favorite operating system.
The ESA recently released this photo of a pair of stars being born, a brilliant image of Herbig-Haro 46/47, near the Gum Nebula. Taken by the JWST, the protostars are located somewhere at the center of the pink and orange diffraction spikes in the photo. The orange cloud is matter ejected from the young stars, […]
Checking in with the Perseverence rover, the news this week is the Martian donut, or rather a donut-shaped rock that the SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager snapped a photo of. Is it a meteorite fragment? That’s one theory, put forward by SETI, but when contacted by CNN, Jim Rice, a scientist in at Arizona State University, does […]
Okay so everyone has probably read about the lawyer who used ChatGPT to write a court filing only for the AI to just make up fake cases, which the lawyer did not independently verify leading to him getting into serious trouble in court. My friend Bert has made a compelling argument that even though AI […]
I swear I didn’t intend this to be a space news blog but I have to share this historic news, the crew of the first crewed mission to the moon in my lifetime. Meet the astronauts! Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will make a trip to the moon and back, although […]
Carnegie Mellon University is sending a rover built by students to the moon. Called “Iris”, this tiny rover is the size of a shoebox and weighs only 2kg. It is built from carbon fiber and will actually be the first American robot on the moon. The payload is being sent by commercial company United Launch […]
I have to admit, like many others, I find ChatGPT to be extremely amusing. My latest prompt is thus: Write me a poem, in iambic pentameter, a lament for a truck that is stuck under the low-clearance bridge on Storrow Drive in Boston. Include references to Dunkin’ Donuts, the Red Sox, and Paul Revere. And […]
One of the mission objectives of the Perseverance Mars rover is to retrieve samples from Martian rocks and soil and keep them until a future mission retrieves them. The retrieval missions are still at the early proposal stages, but Perseverance has already collected its samples. Some are stored in the robot’s body. and the rest […]
NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which launched on the Artemis I mission on November 16th last month, made a successful return to Earth after doing two lunar flybys. It splashed down yesterday at 9:40 a.m. PST off the coast of California, 50 years to the day of the Apollo 17 landing, humankind’s last trip to the moon. Congrats […]