Two days until Insight touches down on Mars. Here's everything you need to know about the landing: https://t.co/s9D2oX5NlO pic.twitter.com/TkPAfStcov
— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) November 24, 2018
On November 26th, a mole will land on Mars https://t.co/s9D2oX5NlO pic.twitter.com/28M0Kg2HYy
— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) November 20, 2018
Who's excited to land on Mars tomorrow? Quick show of hands. https://t.co/bT31DoPYqw pic.twitter.com/20we5fJy4w
— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) November 25, 2018
I love The Oatmeal. I love that NASA and JPL are having Matthew Inman live tweet the 7-minutes of terror.
And if we can keep landing on Mars, I believe we can solve Climate Change. Yes, it might (ok, probably) just come down to 7-minutes of terror there, too, but I believe.
Open thread
opiejeanne
Inspired by John Cole’s trek to the apple farms we headed east on I-90 out of Seattle yesterday and went as far as Thorp, just past Cle Elum; there’s a produce stand there in a huge barn, but not a lot of produce yesterday. We bought some apples: Pacific Rose, Lady Alice to try, and Honey Crisp. The Pacific Rose may have been mislabelled because they look nothing like the photos online, and the Honey Crisp may have been a mistake but at $1.49/lb we were dazzled.
We didn’t go farther because there was a lot of snow in the passes and it was past 3pm by the time we got there, and coming back through Snoqualmie Pass after dark might have been nasty last night. There were some ominous clouds hanging around over the Cascades.
It was a nice ramble, but we need to do it earlier in the fall when the farms have their stands open.
opiejeanne
I should add that mr opiejeanne is very excited about the Mars landing.
Corner Stone
@opiejeanne: $1.49/lb for Honey Crisp is a pretty good price, and IMO well worth it.
debbie
@opiejeanne:
That’s a great price for Honeycrisp. Here, the stores sell them for $2.98/pound.
germy
Mars needs women
Corner Stone
Re: Mars landing. Someone wake me when Elon Musk starts calling the JPL engineers pedophiles. #BeBess
opiejeanne
@Corner Stone: The local farmstand in Bothell is called Yakima, and that’s their regular price. They closed down right after Hallowe’en and now they’re selling Christmas trees. I should have bought loads of Honey Crisp and stuck them in the fridge. These look a little bruised and may not last long enough to be eaten.
Corner Stone
I could be wrong, but it’s my understanding that the “landing” part isn’t the issue. Kind of like my son informing me that people don’t have a fear of flying, they have a fear of abruptly no longer flying.
opiejeanne
@debbie: $3.49 in our grocery store.
Corner Stone
@germy: Turns out I’m not so different from the Martians after all. Except for the whole “repopulate” part. I also usually get the same reaction at 37 seconds or so into the clip.
West of the Rockies
Back to the apples… Blah. (I know, I don’t have to participate.)
But thank you, TaMara, for a hopeful post. That NASA project is amazing.
germy
opiejeanne
@West of the Rockies: Well, pardon me.
Corner Stone
@opiejeanne: Execution by being beaten to death by a sack of rotting apples!
frosty fred
For assorted reasons I’d missed the farmer’s market the last two or three weeks so I was glad to get back yesterday and find Winesaps from Apple Hill. I try to have some every year in memory of my grandmother, who used to tell a childhood story about them. (Ultimately that story led to my interest in genealogy/family history.)
NotMax
How does NASA get an unlimited budget?
Announce they struck oil when Insight digs down into Mars.
:)
NotMax
@Corner Stone
Not a problem? Success rate to date is less than 50%.
dnfree
I am psyched and nervous for the Mars landing. The time delay between when it actually happens and when they find out about it must be agonizing!
I worked at Argonne National Laboratory at the time of the first moon landing, and it was a great place to be. (We didn’t have anything to do with it, but it was a critical mass of scientists.) People brought in very small portable TVs and we all gathered around. Every time there is one of these landings, manned or otherwise, I experience some of the same emotions.
dnfree
@Corner Stone: You remind me of one of my former co-workers (or your son does). We used to have to file “near-miss” reports on accidents that came close but didn’t happen. My co-worker used to say, “Shouldn’t they be called near-hit reports?”
realbtl
@opiejeanne: Next time search out some Cameos. They are the best.
TaMara (HFG)
@opiejeanne: I stuck a bunch of diced apples in my intant-pot with a little bit of brown sugar and some lemon juice and cooked for all of about 3 minutes (so they still retained their shape) and then froze them. Great for apple crisp or pies, also I have great recipe for apple filled cookies.
You know, if they’re going to go to waste. ?
NotMax
@dnfree
Yup. Slowing from 12,000 mph on approach to 5 mph on touchdown is quite the feat all on its own.
Plus after successful (fingers crossed) landing, Insight will quickly be on the far side of Mars, so even more hours of anticipation before planetary rotation brings it back into signal range to check on initial deployment procedures (including planned snapping of some photos with the lens caps on).
Mnemosyne
The Monterey Bay Aquarium will be live-tweeting, too, if marine animals are more your thing. They have a great social media presence on both Twitter and Facebook.
https://mobile.twitter.com/MontereyAq/status/1066429092860284928
FlipYrWhig
@dnfree: There’s a commercial now for I think headlights that talks about how you can avoid “near-misses like these.” Isn’t avoiding a near-miss a hit? (Yes, I am annoying.)
dmsilev
Mars kills spacecraft. Lots of them, over the years. One might be tempted to suspect active defenses on the part of the Martians, but that couldn’t explain things like a confusion over whether Imperial or Metric units were being used on one particular craft.
NASA/JPL has gotten pretty good at it though, so fingers crossed.
After InSight, the next one up is Mars 2020, a rover similar to Curiosity with a different set of instruments plus some mechanical upgrades. I’m sure it will get a name at some point as well.
Spinoza Is My Co-Pilot
High tech, NASA-style solution (or, rather, set of solutions, I suppose) to climate change? Yeah, it would be pretty to think so…
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
I dunno, “near-miss” seems to be a pretty obvious euphemism so people don’t freak out like they would if the pilot said, “Well, folks, we just had a near hit with that other airliner you saw, but it’s okay now.”
Major Major Major Major
@opiejeanne: I’ll admit I did actually exclaim “god, what IS it with white people and apple farms!” But that’s a running joke with me and my husband.
West of the Rockies
@Corner Stone:
I think death would come by contagion or suffocation from the decomposing apple ooze rather than blunt force.
Nonetheless, I know my disinterest in apples is my issue. You guys nerd out on apples all you want! ?
NotMax
Should anyone be interested, friends’ weekly radio show on things tech devoted the last half of their first hour yesterday to the Insight mission. Fast forward to somewhere around the 30 minute mark.
sukabi
@opiejeanne: come down a bit further to Chehalis. There’s a little shop called Veggies, their prices on fruit is a lot better than regular grocery stores.
1849 N National Ave, Chehalis, WA 98532
They have a pretty good apple selection for a small shop.
Gravenstone
@dnfree:
Think I’ve told this story before, but in the early 80s I and several college classmates toured Argonne. They showed us a “hot box” and as we were talking about it, one of my classmates walks over and starts playing with the remote manipulators! Needless to say, our guide was not exactly pleased with this development. Fortunately, they allowed us to finish the tour.
TaMara (HFG)
Okay…so I guess mean is the new Thanksgiving weekend tradition.
I’m off to enjoy the day.
FlipYrWhig
@Mnemosyne: It seems like there’s a slightly different taboo too — like maybe they were told that suggesting that other people’s headlights make accidents more likely was over the line. So then they had to say that the other guys’ headlights play a role in close calls / “near misses” but with their headlights there’s never a close call in the first place. But I think I’d say “close calls” instead of “near misses” to avoid the ambiguity. But, like I said, I am annoying.
NotMax
@West of the Rockies
One might refer to it as the core problem.
;)
MobiusKlein
@Mnemosyne: ‘near miss’ makes more sense when you think about the categories and sub-categoires:
Hit
Direct Hit
Glancing Hit
Miss
Near Miss
Total Miss
Regardless on what your intent was, “Near Miss” is an interesting grouping.
If you want to hit the target, it’s good to know you were very close.
If you want to avoid the target, near misses are a sign you were lucky – this time.
Brickley Paiste
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/facebook-immoral.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Aleta
@germy: Earth Girls Are Easy
Arclite
Landing on Mars requires intelligent and educated people to come together in common purpose to achieve a goal.
Overcoming climate change requires dumb and uneducated people to overcome greed and self-interest for future generations.
Not sure these are really comparable.
BriceFromOhio
The “If my dogs were a pair of middle-aged men” stories were disgustingly entertaining.
J R in WV
Am eating a Michigan Honeycrisp right now, so juicy and delicious!!!
Been in the fridge for at least a couple of weeks, still great. They keep well, don’t they~!
Did you all see the “apple forest” story the other day? Origin of all our apples, a small forest of nothing but apple trees, wild ones, in Khazakistan. however you spel that name…
NobodySpecial
Mars is such a goddamned honeytrap that people can’t help but want to go to it, even though it won’t do much to help us study climate science. The big problem is the damn thing doesn’t have a magnetic field. That’s less than useless to us. Venus is actually a better target, but blah.
Brachiator
@dnfree:
The crash of the European Mars lander was described by some of the scientists behind it as a “near success.”
This was, perhaps being kind.
I got nothing but respect for all the people who have to try to get this right.
Arclite
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is fierce, intelligent, and says all the right things. She’s the public face of the Dems right now, and IMO you couldn’t have gotten anyone better.
Aleta
https://qz.com/1470153/a-dutch-church-is-holding-non-stop-services-for-a-refugee-family/
MagdaInBlack
@Arclite:
I liked her fire and intelligence from the beginning. It was my hope she would choose a mentor who could refine that.
It appears she may have done so, in Pelosi.
Let us hope. ☺️
West of the Rockies
@NotMax:
Indeed. However, I worked on an apple orchard as a kid–that is probably the seed issue. (Insert eye-roll emoji here.)
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Major Major Major Major: Was your mission to find a cafe to work in successful? Close to home?
You know that TriBeCa is the home of Robert DeNiro’s film festival, right? That’s about all I know about your neighborhood.
From Both Sides of the Pond
OT: Anyone following what is going on in the Sea of Azov between the Russians and Ukrainians? Blocking the straits, ramming, shots fired, and blocking of Ukrainian points of entry to the west by ‘cars with foreign registrations’, etc?
ETA: Cheryl’s all over it with a new thread.
Aleta
https://www.wral.com/dozens-arrested-after-undocumented-man-living-in-durham-church-for-11-months-detained/18015326/
Mnemosyne
@MobiusKlein:
Hm, interesting point. I think you may be right and that’s the origin of the term, which is why it doesn’t entirely make sense in everyday English.
dnfree
@FlipYrWhig: See, that’s not annoying to me–it’s logical. But I’m annoying to some people also.
dnfree
@Spinoza Is My Co-Pilot: Agreed! Plus, Spinoza!
dnfree
@Arclite: Unfortunately, that hits the nail right about on the head. Not a near miss.