Sunday Screening

All right. Maybe this makes me four years old, but I can't stop watching the dancing walrus:

...

NOW, to what I planned to post today! Here's an animation -- couple years old now -- of NASA's "M.E.R." rover, detailing its (successful) takeoff, flight, and landing on Mars. And set to a song by Nine Inch Nails. Only on the Internet:

(If Trent Reznor's music somehow isn't bombastic enough for you, there's also a longer version of this video set to "Mars" from Holst's Planets suite. Which, and I say this as a lover of over-the-top classical brass, is basically seven minutes of trumpets going "BWAA! BWAA! BWABADADAAA!" until your ears bleed. You have been warned.)

Space travel these days, Nine Inch Nails notwithstanding, is a depressing thing. Gone is the era of Sputnik, when satellites were wonderingly called "artificial moons":

That kind of wide-eyed futurism seems laughable today. The great legacy of space exploration, aside from George Bush's long-abandoned Martian ambitions, is the old Soviet crap that's falling on Kazakhstan (click that link, it's a beautiful and discomfiting photo slideshow); entrop is the word of the day. Hell, our collective image of satellites today is like nothing so much as that obnoxious commercial from the Super Bowl, where nerdy little satellites get shoved out of the sky by a great big asshole DirectTV satellite. ("Outta my way, dorks!")

Which is not as far-fetched as it seems, actually; "space junk", the accumulation of obsolete satellite parts in Earth's orbit, is becoming a serious problem for satellites and space travel, since in that environment even a tiny bit of debris can cause a humongous explosion. Yet we just keep launching stuff up there... my core-science TF the other week related an all-too-believable scenario, called Kessler Syndrome. Basically, Kessler Syndrome is where an accelerating feedback loop of debris busting satellites, thus creating more debris, busting more satellites, and so forth could quickly destroy everything in our orbit and create an impenetrable cloud of garbage around Earth -- which would not only render all modern telecommunications useless, but permanently "lock us in" from any further space travel. Yikes!

But who needs a doomsayer? I'll close with another Mars animation, showing the upside of increased space exploration. This one was widely lauded for its realism:

Enjoy the rest of the weekend, everybody. This is an open thread.

Awesome!

Apparently, You Only Live Twice, by far the coolest Bond film, is coming true!

CIA agents: just remember, when we have to invade the Japanese Chinese volcano hideout, the "crater" is really a door that slides open, and if you wait 'till the helicopter has to fly out, you can get in.