Recently in THE HAPPENING WORLD

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Flying Spam: Now Do it on Mars

So, of course you're wondering, “What does it say?” Well, after taking out the skew, perspective projection, thresholding, inverting, scaling up, shifting and multiplying to expand dots to (kind of) squares, you get:

This, in turn, decodes to the URL: https://game.bilibili.com/pcr/1anniversarytocode-h5/

I have no idea what following this link may do to your Social Credit score.

Posted at 10:35 Permalink

Monday, April 19, 2021

Ingenuity Helicopter Flies on Mars

Update: (2021-04-1912:05 UTC)

Posted at 11:48 Permalink

Sunday, April 18, 2021

First Flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: Live from Mission Control

NASA's Webcast is scheduled to start on 2021-04-19 at 10:15 UTC.

Posted at 20:31 Permalink

Friday, April 16, 2021

SpaceX: NASA Selects Starship for Human Lunar Landing System

Update: here is the NASA Source Selection Statement [PDF]. (2021-04-16 22:15 UTC)

Update: this is the NASA video announcement of the SpaceX selection for the Artemis Human Landing System. (2021-04-16 23:55 UTC)

Posted at 21:31 Permalink

Lots of Launches Coming Up

There hasn't been an Ariane 5 launch since August, 2020—eight months ago.

Posted at 11:00 Permalink

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Blue Origin NS-15 New Shepard Suborbital Launch

Launch is scheduled for 15:15 UTC on 2021-04-14, and will be a rehearsal of a launch with customers on board. The Webcast will probably start around 15:00 UTC. These launches are often delayed from the start of the launch window, but rarely scrubbed.

Posted at 12:36 Permalink

Monday, April 12, 2021

Asteroid 2021 GW4 Zips Through the Geosynchronous Orbit Belt

Here are the orbital elements of the asteroid and a plot of its orbit courtesy of the JPL Small-Body Database.

Posted at 11:50 Permalink

Friday, April 9, 2021

Neuralink: Monkey Mind-Pong

Here is more about Neuralink's brain-machine interface, including Gertrude, the pig with the wired snout.

Posted at 12:18 Permalink

M Equals Two: Soyuz Docks with the ISS

On September 12th, 1966, Gemini 11 rendezvoused and docked with its Agena target vehicle just 94 minutes after liftoff, demonstrating the direct ascent first orbit rendezvous which would used in lunar orbit by Apollo. Commander Pete Conrad exclaimed “M=1!” after accomplishing the first revolution docking, Fifty-five years later, Soyuz has gotten it down to two revolutions, docking with the International Space Station two orbits after launch.

Posted at 11:57 Permalink

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

It's Magnetic Moment of the Muon Day!

Fermilab reports precision measurements which strengthen the case for physics beyond the standard model (anomalous magnetic moment of the muon).

And on the same day, a computational quantum chromodynamics group reports that previous theoretical calculations were incorrect and that a recalculation from first principles is consistent with the experimental results.

Posted at 20:41 Permalink

Farewell, Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief

Apparently SpaceX have given up on trying to catch payload fairings before splashdown and will routinely recover from the sea in the future. Having now re-flown a number of fairing halves after they splashed down, that seems a viable strategy for the future.

Posted at 20:18 Permalink

SpaceX Starlink Launch

Launch is scheduled for 16:34 UTC today, 2021-04-07.

Posted at 11:03 Permalink

Monday, April 5, 2021

Winning at Cornhole with a US$32,000 Industrial Robot

What is cornhole? Complete source code is available on GitHub,

Posted at 10:57 Permalink

Sunday, April 4, 2021

Russian Floating Small Nuclear Reactors Now In Service

Rosatom is now offering floating nuclear power plants to other countries.

Posted at 12:06 Permalink

Mars Helicopter Ingenuity on the Surface, Getting Ready to Fly

Posted at 10:07 Permalink

Saturday, April 3, 2021

Prompting Artificial Intelligences: A New Kind of Programming?

Here is more on GPT-3.

Posted at 12:07 Permalink

Thursday, April 1, 2021

Rocket Lab: Building a Path to the Moon

Posted at 14:17 Permalink

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Mars Helicopter “Ingenuity” Almost Ready to Deploy

Here is more about Ingenuity.

Posted at 10:55 Permalink

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Retrocausality in a Simple Optical Experiment?

Fourmilab's RetroPsychoKinesis Experiments have now been running for 24 years, with a total of 457,876 experiments run by 35,367 subjects.

Posted at 15:27 Permalink

SpaceX Starship SN11: Launches in Dense Fog, Ends Badly

Posted at 13:11 Permalink