A Milestone for the Black Mamba!

Image courtesy of Bleacher Report - Facebook

Props to Kobe Bryant for surpassing Michael Jordan on the NBA's all-time scoring list tonight! The L.A. Lakers veteran achieved this milestone during today's 100-94 win over the Minnesota Timberwolves...when Bryant made two straight free throws (the second one earning him his 32,293rd point) in the 2nd quarter and the game was briefly halted so that teammates, opposing players and the coaching staff could congratulate KB24 on his achievement. Michael Jordan ended his career (both with the Chicago Bulls and the Washington Wizards) with 32,292 points, while Kobe has now amassed 32,310 points after tonight's victory. All that's left for the Black Mamba to do to cement his place as Jordan's rightful heir as the greatest player in the NBA is to win a 6th championship ring. Sadly, I don't think Bryant will achieve that feat with this current Lakers squad. Despite the fact that he deserves props for making a game-winning 3-pointer against the San Antonio Spurs last Saturday, Nick Young still gets on my nerves. That is all.






Image courtesy of Bleacher Report - Facebook

The U.S. Navy's New Laser Gun...

U.S. Navy

Just thought I'd share this cool YouTube video showing the U.S. Navy employing the newest piece in its arsenal, called the Laser Weapon System (LaWS), against targets in the Arabian Gulf last month. Firing an invisible 30-kilowatt laser beam that costs less than a dollar per shot, LaWS (which is installed aboard the warship USS Ponce) was able to successfully destroy small (unmanned) boats as well as a flying drone...all with the use of a handheld video game-type controller. The laser beam is invisible for now; pretty soon it will be visible, and in red or green color too. Not only that, but this weapon will be used aboard craft flying on Twin-Ion Engines and capable of soaring through hyperspace. Yes, I'm making a Star Wars reference there... Carry on.

Well THAT'S A Bummer...

Don't ask me how I found out, but I just discovered that Nancy may already be married. Despite the fact that her Facebook page still lists her as engaged, I saw elsewhere that Nancy is now beyond that. Or...her fiancé/husband/whatever jumped the gun and decided to refer to her as his wife on the site I went to even though their relationship status hasn't changed. Nonetheless, I have to assume that she is finally married unless I want to get myself in hot water and continue to talk to her. If Nancy did officially tie the knot, it annoys me that she would keep the news secret and not post an inkling of it on her Facebook page (heck, there is only one picture of Nancy with her fiancé/husband/whatever in her photos section)...and text me if I want to go hiking and whatnot. Nancy did go to Hawaii last month (for only 4 days); who would've thought that it may have potentially been for her honeymoon and not some random vacation? Just making an assumption here.

All I can say is, it definitely looks like this won't play out like The Office where Jim Halpert won Pam Beasley over after she was in an 8-year-long engagement with another co-worker. Sorry Jim—but in my scenario, Pam finally got hitched to Roy. That is all.

Curiosity Update: A Cool Discovery About Mount Sharp!

NASA / JPL - Caltech / ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / MSSS

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds Clues to How Water Helped Shape Martian Landscape (Press Release)

Observations by NASA’s Curiosity rover indicate Mars' Mount Sharp was built by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years.

This interpretation of Curiosity’s finds in Gale Crater suggests ancient Mars maintained a climate that could have produced long-lasting lakes at many locations on the Red Planet.

"If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground on Mars,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “A more radical explanation is that Mars' ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but so far we don't know how the atmosphere did that."

Why this layered mountain sits in a crater has been a challenging question for researchers. Mount Sharp stands about 3 miles (5 kilometers) tall, its lower flanks exposing hundreds of rock layers. The rock layers – alternating between lake, river and wind deposits -- bear witness to the repeated filling and evaporation of a Martian lake much larger and longer-lasting than any previously examined close-up.

"We are making headway in solving the mystery of Mount Sharp," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. "Where there's now a mountain, there may have once been a series of lakes."

Curiosity currently is investigating the lowest sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp, a section of rock 500 feet (150 meters) high dubbed the Murray formation. Rivers carried sand and silt to the lake, depositing the sediments at the mouth of the river to form deltas similar to those found at river mouths on Earth. This cycle occurred over and over again.

"The great thing about a lake that occurs repeatedly, over and over, is that each time it comes back it is another experiment to tell you how the environment works," Grotzinger said. "As Curiosity climbs higher on Mount Sharp, we will have a series of experiments to show patterns in how the atmosphere and the water and the sediments interact. We may see how the chemistry changed in the lakes over time. This is a hypothesis supported by what we have observed so far, providing a framework for testing in the coming year."

After the crater filled to a height of at least a few hundred yards and the sediments hardened into rock, the accumulated layers of sediment were sculpted over time into a mountainous shape by wind erosion that carved away the material between the crater perimeter and what is now the edge of the mountain.

On the 5-mile (8-kilometer) journey from Curiosity’s 2012 landing site to its current work site at the base of Mount Sharp, the rover uncovered clues about the changing shape of the crater floor during the era of lakes.

"We found sedimentary rocks suggestive of small, ancient deltas stacked on top of one another," said Curiosity science team member Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College in London. "Curiosity crossed a boundary from an environment dominated by rivers to an environment dominated by lakes."

Despite earlier evidence from several Mars missions that pointed to wet environments on ancient Mars, modeling of the ancient climate has yet to identify the conditions that could have produced long periods warm enough for stable water on the surface.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project uses Curiosity to assess ancient, potentially habitable environments and the significant changes the Martian environment has experienced over millions of years. This project is one element of NASA's ongoing Mars research and preparation for a human mission to the planet in the 2030s.

"Knowledge we're gaining about Mars' environmental evolution by deciphering how Mount Sharp formed will also help guide plans for future missions to seek signs of Martian life," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

JPL, managed by the California Institute of Technology, built the rover and manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA / JPL - Caltech / MSSS

Another Championship for Los Angeles!

Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

Props to the L.A. Galaxy for winning another Major League Soccer title at the StubHub Center in Carson, California tonight! Landon Donovan and company defeated the New England Revolution, 2-1, to claim the Galaxy its fifth MLS Cup in franchise history (and a sixth Cup for Donovan). With today's accolades, Donovan is now retiring from the world of soccer. On the plus side though, the Galaxy's win and the L.A. Kings' Stanley Cup victory about six months ago show that Los Angeles is still the City of Champions! Not bad at all.

Rise and Shine, New Horizons!

NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

At 6:53 PM, Pacific Standard Time today, the flight team for NASA's New Horizons mission received full confirmation that the Pluto-bound spacecraft awoke from its final hibernation period that began in August. New Horizons technically woke up around 12 PM, PST today—and transmitted a signal to Earth almost two hours later. Considering the fact that the grand piano-sized probe is 2.9 billion miles from our planet, it took 4.5 hours for the transmission to travel across the solar system until it was detected by a Deep Space Network antenna in Canberra, Australia. New Horizons will now spend the remainder of this month having its flight systems and science instruments checked out for its highly-anticipated Pluto encounter, which begins on January 15. New Horizons is in the home stretch of its 9-year journey to the dwarf planet that Clyde Tombaugh discovered in 1930. In fact, some of the late astronomer's ashes are onboard the spacecraft...and in 7-months' time his presence will literally be at Pluto and its five moons once New Horizons makes its closest approach. Sounds very poetic, indeed.

Dawn Update: Ceres on the Horizon...

NASA / JPL - Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA

Dawn Snaps Its Best-Yet Image of Dwarf Planet Ceres (Press Release)

The Dawn spacecraft has delivered a glimpse of Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt, in a new image taken 740,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from the dwarf planet. This is Dawn's best image yet of Ceres as the spacecraft makes its way toward this unexplored world.

"Now, finally, we have a spacecraft on the verge of unveiling this mysterious, alien world. Soon it will reveal myriad secrets Ceres has held since the dawn of the solar system," said Marc Rayman, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, chief engineer and mission director of the Dawn mission.

Dawn will be captured into Ceres' orbit in March, marking the first visit to a dwarf planet by a spacecraft. To date, the best images of Ceres come from the Hubble Space Telescope. In early 2015, however, Dawn will begin delivering images at much higher resolution.

Since launching in 2007, Dawn has already visited Vesta, a giant protoplanet currently located 104 million miles (168 million kilometers) away from Ceres. The distance between Vesta and Ceres is greater than the distance between the Earth and the sun. During its 14 months in orbit around Vesta, the spacecraft delivered unprecedented scientific insights, including images of its cratered surface and important clues about its geological history. Vesta and Ceres are the two most massive bodies in the main asteroid belt.

The nine-pixel-wide image of Ceres released today serves as a final calibration of the science camera that is necessary before Dawn gets to Ceres. The dwarf planet appears approximately as bright as Venus sometimes appears from Earth. Ceres has an average diameter of about 590 miles (950 kilometers).

Dawn begins its approach phase toward Ceres on December 26.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington D.C. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany, with significant contributions by German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The Framing Camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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NASA / JPL - Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA

Celebrating Orion's Big Moment...

NASA

Just thought I'd share these photos that were taken during yesterday's NASA Social event at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Pasadena, California. Around 40 lucky social media users including myself had the privilege of watching presentations pertaining to today's (scrubbed) launch attempt for the Orion spacecraft...which is set to make its first flight into space and set America back on the path of sending astronauts beyond Earth's atmosphere from U.S. soil. Along with learning about Orion's mission, dubbed Exploration Flight Test 1, we also got to take a tour of JPL facilities (I never get tired of these)—such as the Space Flight Operations Facility, the Spacecraft Assembly Facility (where a second version of NASA's "flying saucer," also known as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, is being assembled) and the In-Situ Instrument Laboratory (where an engineering model for the now-in-construction InSight Mars lander resides). I should've went back to JPL this morning to watch on TV Orion's splashdown in the Pacific Ocean after a flawless flight from Florida, but it's all good. All that matters is that the capsule destined to take us to Mars one day sees the vacuum of space by the end of this weekend. Carry on.

LINK: Photos I took at the 2014 Orion NASA Social

Hayabusa2 Takes Flight!

JAXA

Japan Launches Asteroid Mission (Press Release)

On Dec. 3, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched its Hayabusa 2 mission to rendezvous with an asteroid, land a small probe plus three mini rovers on its surface, and then return samples to Earth. NASA and JAXA are cooperating on the science of the mission and NASA will receive a portion of the Hayabusa 2 sample in exchange for providing Deep Space Network communications and navigation support for the mission.

Hayabusa 2 builds on lessons learned from JAXA’s initial Hayabusa mission, which collected samples from a small asteroid named Itokawa and returned them to Earth in June 2010. Hayabusa 2’s target is a 750 meter-wide asteroid named 1999 JU3, because of the year when it was discovered by the NASA-sponsored Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research project, Lexington, Massachusetts. This is a C-type asteroid which are thought to contain more organic material than other asteroids. Scientists hope to better understand how the solar system evolved by studying samples from these asteroids.

“We think of C-type asteroids as being less altered than others,” says Lucy McFadden, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Bringing that material back and being able to look at it in the lab — I think it’s going to be very exciting.”

On Nov. 17, NASA and JAXA signed a Memorandum of Understanding for cooperation on the Hayabusa 2 mission and NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security – Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission to mutually maximize their missions’ results. OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to launch in 2016. It will be the first U.S. asteroid sample return mission. OSIRIS-REx will rendezvous with the 500-meter-sized asteroid Bennu in 2019 for detailed reconnaissance and a return of samples to Earth in 2023.

Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx will further strengthen the two space agencies’ relationship in asteroid exploration.

The missions will also help NASA choose its target for the first-ever mission to capture and redirect an asteroid. NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) in the 2020s will help NASA test new technologies needed for future human missions for the Journey to Mars.

Comets and asteroids contain material that formed in a disk surrounding our infant sun. The hundreds of thousands of known asteroids are leftovers from material that didn't coalesce into a planet or moon in the inner solar system. The thousands of known comets likely formed in the outer solar system, far from the sun's heat, where water exists as ice.

Larger objects like dwarf planets Pluto and Ceres also formed in the outer solar system, where water ice is stable. Pluto and Ceres will soon be explored by NASA missions New Horizons and Dawn, respectively. Asteroids and comets are of unique interest to scientists, though, because they could hold clues to the origins of life on Earth.

These missions have greatly increased scientific knowledge on Earth about our solar system and the history of our planet. Many scientists suspect we could find organic material in asteroids and comets, like amino acids—critical building blocks for life, which could help answer questions about the origins of life on Earth. These questions drive us to continue exploring the intriguing asteroids and comets of our solar system.

Multiple missions that are operating in space or in development by NASA and international partners could bring us much closer to answering that question in our lifetimes and also help identify Near-Earth Objects that might pose a risk of Earth impact, and further help inform developing options for planetary defense.

Source: NASA.Gov

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JAXA


JAXA

U.N. Squadron...

In a tradition that started four years ago with me talking about the old Disney animated TV show Darkwing Duck, just thought I'd start this month off by getting all nostalgic about the Super Nintendo (SNES) video game, U.N. Squadron. This side-scrolling shooting game involved playing as one of three pilots (Shin Kazama, Mickey Simon or Greg Gates) and piloting aircraft ranging from actual fighters such as the A-10 Thunderbolt and YF-23, to the fictional F-200 stealth jet (which was my favorite to use). In all of the missions, you spent the majority of the levels battling it out with other conventional combat aircraft and armored vehicles on the surface. It wasn't till the very end of the level that you confronted the bosses...which ranged from a giant battle tank armed with a rocket launcher, a trio of F-117 Stealth Fighters, a B-2 Bomber and a Yamato-like battleship, to a huge land-based aircraft carrier, a heavily-armed jungle fortress and a large um, underground-lurking mothership that was the final boss you had to defeat in order to complete the game. In fact, what made me like this game was the fact that a few of the missions involved flying your aircraft inside of a mountain or into underground caves. They reminded me of the chase sequence inside the Death Star tunnel at the climax of Return of the Jedi!



U.N. Squadron was such a fun game to play that it tended to make me daydream about what it would be like to be an aviator and fight against these kinds of outlandish foes in real life. The idea that you could pilot a jet traveling at Mach 1 underground (though it never appeared that you were flying that fast in the game) was obviously ridiculous, but to think that there could be an enemy that possessed a giant fortress in the middle of a jungle and a huge aircraft carrier in the desert was pretty interesting. Of course, I was 13 at the time...so I was thinking a lot of crazy things about the games I played on SNES. But heck— If I ever had the opportunity to play U.N. Squadron again, I would. If I could download Star Wars: X-Wing to my laptop and play it like it was 1995, then I can definitely do the same thing with U.N. Squadron. Not only that, but I'd probably download another favorite SNES title of mine to my computer, F-Zero. (I no longer have the SNES; one of my siblings probably sold it!) Speaking of F-Zero, I think I have my next childhood / adolescent thing to talk about this following December... Carry on.