It will hit the Martian atmosphere at 3:55 PM eastern coastal elite/12:55 left coast time (2:55 central/1:55 mountain flyover country time). With any luck, about seven minutes later it will hit the Martian surface at a speed that doesn’t turn the rover and it’s helicopter payload into scrap.
Here’s a chatty NASA live stream:
Animation of the landing process:
This ornithopter (Russian form the looks/sounds of it) recently flew in a controlled manner. It looks like it was a rough ride; it’s not clear to me what practical advantage such a system has over pretty much *any* other form of aerial locomotion beyond “because it’s cool.” Which is, of course, reason enough to do pretty much anything.
An earlier flight of a prior iteration did not go so well.
An even earlier flight of an even earlier iteration *did* fly successfully, if slowly and incredibly loudly:
A video of the designers. Turn closed captioning on to read what they have to say:
I suppose if they could improve the system so that it takes off and lands vertically, then switches to fixed-wing forward flight with a conventional propeller, it might turn out to be an efficient-ish drone for some applications.
Cruising along…
Here’s your slightly obsolete word of the day:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/blithering?s=t
Example:
Joe Biden on China’s human rights violations and genocide against the Uighurs: “culturally there are different norms”
Shameful. pic.twitter.com/kTtXvTIsK6
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 17, 2021
All sales are final.
He’s been fighting lung cancer for a while. Get ready for a tidal wave of gloating by The Worst People In The World.
UPDATE: As Expected.
Some actual wisdom:
Keep in mind, their hatred of Rush is really a hatred of you. Their celebration of his death is the hatred of the ideas he shared with millions of people. They hate you as much as they hate him, and that hate stems from an ignorance they have no desire to cure.
— Brandon Morse (beep/boop) (@TheBrandonMorse) February 17, 2021
The trailer below is all there is, all that there is planned to be, created as an art project by one guy. Compare to the dreck pumped out by Hollywood.
A similarly-themed short film the guy produced a littler earlier. Maybe cosmic horror…maybe shrooms.
I saw a few of these weeks/months ago at local WalMarts and Targets and the like and didn’t buy them because… well, why would I? Sigh…
A masterclass in elocution by White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki:
I gotta admit this was the best laugh I had all day.
Difficulty: stuff’s in Finland.
I was directed to an online auction of space replicas. The first items were things like 1/72 scale Space Shuttles and 1/72 scale Saturn V’s and Atlases and Redstones… nice enough, but nothing out of the ordinary.
BUT THEN…
And…
And…
And…
And…
And…
And not last and certainly not least:
Gimme gimme gimme gimme…
Where would I put a 1/10 scale Saturn V if I had one? I have no friggen’ clue.
The auction appears to be a bankruptcy auction:
Online bankruptcy auction under the authority of trustee Mr. M.W. Schüller of Lexington Advocaten in Hoofddorp concerning the inventory originating from the bankruptcy of John Nurnimen Events B.V. at Schiphol. The goods are located in Finland.
“John Nurnimen Events” still has a functioning website, but was declared bankrupt in the Netherlands, so I’m a bit confounded as to what’s going on here. On one hand I’m saddened that such a collection of awesomeness was apparently not a profitable enterprise; on the other hand… it’s Finland. I’m unclear that that would be the best place for such a thing. The specific website for the “NASA – A Human Adventure” traveling exhibition is offline, though it’s archived.
Opening bids on all these things are 100 Euro each. I have no idea what they’ll go for, though I imagine shipping costs could be a bit spendy.
