I’m not perfect
The Cassini spacecraft takes a close look at a row of craters on Saturn’s moon Tethys during the spacecraft’s April 14, 2012, flyby of the moon.
Three large craters are visible along the terminator between day and night on Tethys (660 miles, or 1,062 kilometers across). The larger Odysseus crater also can be seen in profile on the right of the image. Odysseus Crater is 280 miles (450 kilometers) across. See The Great Basin for a closer view of Odysseus.
NASA Gets Two New Hubble Telescopes — Absolutely Free
All good things must come to an end, though. The shuttle is flying no more, and within the next couple of years, the aging telescope will gradually wink out too. It will be a terrible loss to science, and it kind of makes you wish someone had a spare Hubble secretly stashed away, just waiting to be unpacked and sent into orbit. That’s what would happen in the Hollywood version, anyway.
But it turns out that it is happening in real life too. The National Science Foundation has just revealed the existence of not one but two pristine, Hubble-class space telescopes still in their original wrappings in a warehouse in Rochester, N.Y. The pair was originally built for the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency in charge of spy satellites, to look down at Earth rather than up into space. But the NRO has moved on to bigger and better instruments, and decided to hand the telescopes over. “It just blew me away when I heard about this,” says Princeton astrophysicist David Spergel, a member of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Astrophysics and Astronomy. “I knew nothing about it.”
The unexpected gift has sent NASA and the astronomical community, both of which have learned to live with smaller budgets and lower expectations in recent years, into a mild state of shock. It’s not clear what they’ll do with this astonishing gift — and indeed, even among the handful of scientists who have been in on the secret, there’s only a general consensus on how they might use just one of the telescopes, never mind both.
But while the free scopes are essentially there for the taking, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. The cost of adapting cameras and other instruments to the rest of the components, then launching the whole thing and operating it for years won’t be insignificant. “A 50% discount still means you have to come up with the other 50%,” says Spergel. Still, getting the new scope into space should at least be cheaper than it was to launch the Hubble. “Hubble,” he says, “is really a 1960s-era telescope. It’s very heavy and fairly long. This one will be lighter and smaller.” Even with drastic upgrades, Hertz says, it’s plausible that it would cost just $1 billion to adapt and launch the proposed WFIRST — an absurdly low figure for such a powerful machine.
As for the second free telescope, the consensus so far, says Spergel, is that “we wait until sometime in the 2020s to decide what to do with it.” At the moment, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble’s official successor, is eating up the lion’s share of NASA’s science budget, and even at a discount, there’s no way the agency can move ahead with both of the unexpected freebies at once.
I sure hope this doesn’t kill the James Webb Space Telescope.
Tumblr Tuesday: Brasil Edition!
Name Arte na Cidade
Location São PauloArt in the City is a living gallery of public art of all kinds found throughout São Paulo and its outskirts. Kat Draugelis, a part-time English teacher and artist, explores the city every weekend to document new finds.
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As TRAUMÁTICAS Aventuras do Filho do Freud
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Life was easier for famous people before high definition.Meu CV em Anexo
Horrible resumé fails, because good ones are boring.Monique Maion
Jazz and blues singer/songwriter from Brazil.
James Kochalka, “Craft is the Enemy,” from THE CUTE MANIFESTO
Fun fact: the dummy book I made for Steal Like An Artist was Kochalka’s Cute Manifesto (they’re the same format/size) with a homemade book cover:
This was originally the start of an epic letters-column exchange in the old Comics Journal print magazine. I still think of it as one of the most important lessons I ever learned about making comics. There are a lot of different ways you can take it, but for me it means: just make and make and make, don’t redraw the first 4 pages of your Future Greatest Work over and over again waiting for the drawings to be perfect. Get the ideas out of your head and onto paper—over time the drawings will become better and better, and the stories will become better and better, and eventually you’ll make a Great Work by accident, because you’ve been practicing for years. You’ll also have a body of work in your rearview mirror.
