Jul 05
Posted: under General, Technology.
I mentioned the other day that Deep Impact was going to hit a commet so that NASA could study what it’s made up of. (This went off well by the way….left a big crater and all 
).
Now, an astrologer is suing NASA for $300 million for “moral sufferings.” Apparently she earlier said that the experiment would “deform her horoscope.”
I suppose it was inevidable….NASA should have gotten insurance against this years ago.
Jul 05
Posted: under Technology.
When I was checking out Deep Impact the other day, I came across the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Solar System Simulator. This thing is kind of cool. It will show you what anything in the solar system looks like from the perspective of anything else in the solar system. The list of places you can choose from are all of the planets, quite a few moons, and several spacecraft. The latter group includes voyager 1 and 2 (1 should actually be out beyond Pluto now). If you use the default settings, it will show the target so that it takes up 30% of the screen’s width. This means then when you look at earth from Charon it looks like it’s in a sub-lunar orbit… If you instead choose to see it from a certain field of view, you get a more realistic picture……a dot labeled Earth. You can also choose to see what it looks like from any time between 1990 and 2025.
Assuming the simulator actually works correctly, this is useful for seeing what side of Earth is facing an object at a certain time. They used this on the deep impact site to show what area of the planet would be able to see the impact itself.
You could also use it as a fancy moon phase calculator I guess…..
