7 MINUTES OF TERROR

Seven minutes of terror when the Mars Curiosity (MSL) rover undertakes its planned descent to the Martian surface …

Team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity Mars rover’s final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars

Now that’s what I call systems engineering!

Vega Launch – Europe’s Newest Satellite Launcher

 
Tomorrow, 13th February 2012 will see the launch of Europe’s newest satellite launch vehicle, Vega, from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Spaceport at Kourou, weather permitting. This first test flight Vega launch will carry 9 payloads – seven Cubesat satellites plus two Italian Space Agency satellites.

The video above provides an extremely interesting overview of the Vega programme. The project is controlled and managed from ESA’s ESRIN Centre for Earth Observation at Frascati, just south of Rome. An idyllic location, given it is at the heart of some of Italy’s finest vineyards. [Read more…]

Radar Wars

Radar Wars

Radar Wars

Not my usual sort of post, but this just had to be shared.

Believe me, this could well be true. I could recount some similar, real situations – but then they’d have to shoot me!

Attribution: I always like to acknowledge, reference and attribute things which I put into posts, if possible. On researching this I couldn’t track down the original source but I did find this: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/radar.asp. It’s well worth a read as there are a lot of solid technical facts therein.


Warning: Version warning: Imagick was compiled against ImageMagick version 1692 but version 1693 is loaded. Imagick will run but may behave surprisingly in Unknown on line 0