Nancy E. Shaffer's Blog, page 5
September 8, 2015
Titan (NASA Trilogy, #2)
Titan by Stephen Baxter
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is one of the most depressing space operas I have read. A near-future novel written in 1997, it depicts an early-21st century NASA fallen into disrespect and disrepair. Although a mission to Titan would be a really cool endeavor, I actually prefer the real NASA of the 21st century this.
It is said the best way to write fiction is to give your characters obstacles and set-backs. But there’s a line between that and constantly dumping crap upo...
July 16, 2015
Why I am perfectly fine with not calling Pluto a “planet”
The solar system is a much more interesting, complicated place if we throw out the classical “Solar System has 9 planets” model we learned in grade school. And Pluto is just as special.
In science, the term “planet” is no longer useful. It’s too vague and general.
The term goes back thousands of years to a time when the visible objects in our own solar system were lumped in with the stars. They only difference between “planets” and stars, as far as our ancestors could tell, is planets didn’t...
July 8, 2015
Your Pluto-palooza Party Guide
The basics:
http://www.nature.com/news/pluto-fly-by-a-graphical-guide-to-the-historic-mission-1.17927
Detailed timeline of flyby events:
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/06240556-what-to-expect-new-horizons-pluto.html
Where to follow progress:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html (NASA TV) Twitter: #PlutoFlyBy, @NewHorizons2015Also, The Science Channel is going to do a flyby special on the evening of July 15th.
Party goodies:
May 7, 2015
The names of craft
Beagle, Cassini–Huygens, Chang’e, Curiosity, Gaia, Galileo, GRAIL, Juno, Mariner, MAVEN, MESSENGER, Nozomi, Opportunity, OSIRIS-REx, Phoenix, Pioneer, Magellan, Voyager….
We build spacecraft and give them names. The name is the hope, the wish, the magical thinking of scientists and engineers with romantic hearts under their pocket protectors. They give each of their rovers, orbiters, and explorers a name,
– as if the name is somehow identical with the thing’s true nature.
– as if to invoke th...
May 5, 2015
Life, unbounded
A piece that is neither essay nor fiction nor memoir but all of them and none of them (390 words).
We ate emptily to fill the void the stars left, rode and re-rode the Journey Through Inner Space ride at Disneyland, sailed eons and parsecs with Neil deGrasse Tyson, sat shotgun with Captain Picard Take Me With You. We dreamed of being whisked away—exploring moons, planets, nebulae—abducted by aliens and taken somewhere derision didn’t sing down on us for the egregious sin of walking while fa...
May 3, 2015
…And then life throws you a curve ball
I guess… back in November? I started to experience incredible pain while sitting–in my neck, in my back, in my left shoulder. Some of this is arthritis, some is muscle strain from arthritis. I’ve been experiencing arthritic twinges in the knees, back, and neck for a few years now. But I’ve never had any trouble sitting for long periods of time. Then the pain got exponentially worse to the point where I couldn’t sit and write comfortably, and I have to do pain drugs to get through my work day....
A Horse with a Name
After three days in the desert fun
I was looking at a river bed
And the story it told of a river that flowed
Made me sad to think it was dead
America, Horse With No Name
Photo credit: NASA
Filed under: space
December 8, 2014
Space Geeking
I am terribly behind in my space geeking. Life has thrown me a couple of curveballs, and there’s been a lot of cool space stuff to fall behind on geeking about.
(1) Lunar Mission One: A kickstarter campaign by a private British group, Lunar Missions Ltd, to send an unmanned robotic landing module to the South Pole of the Moon and drill deep into the rock for a scientific analysis of the the geological composition of the Moon.
(2) Hayabusa 2 launched on December 3rd. I...
November 10, 2014
Moar space robots!
It’s taken ten years to get there, but early Wednesday, November 12 Central European time (from about 1 AM to 8 AM, which is about 5 PM to midnight Pacific time), the European Space Agency will land a craft on a comet. Their Rosetta spacecraft got to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko three months ago, and has been in a weird jagged “orbit” around it ever since. Now its attached lander, Philae, is being prepped to detach from it.
All the pre-flight stuff is going to happen when I’m busy at a conf...
When space stuff tweets
Yeah, it’s cutesie, but it also makes what is far away and highly technical a little more human.
Mars rover to Mars satellite
Comet lander to Mars rover
(Dwarf-) Planet to planet
Filed under: space
