Categories
Photography

Earthrise

In the 60s NASA sent five Lunar Orbiters to photograph potential landing sites for manned missions to the moon. Each orbiter took pictures onto 70mm film, developed the photos, scanned them into strips called framelets and beamed the images to a receiving station on Earth where they were recorded straight to tape.

The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten.

The Lunar Orbital Image Recovery Project has recovered and digitised over 2,000 of these images from a former McDonald’s in Silicon Valley, including the first ever photo of Earthrise:

earthrise

The WIRED article has some other great photos too, or you can get really stuck in at LOIRP’s site.

earthrise
Categories
Natural Science

Lightning

This dude must be wishing he was dressed as Raiden right now. Even so he could at least have tried to make it look as if the lightning was spewing forth from his outstretched palms (though I guess making yourself taller in a lightning storm isn’t such a great idea).

lightning

Lightning over Athens from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Categories
Photography

40 Shades of Green

eire

Ireland as photographed by NASA (via Flickr)

Categories
Photography

Snow

Taken by NASA’s Terra satelite today:

ice

Pretty freakin cool (click for bigger) though where we are seems to be getting off fairly lightly (not that that’s a bad thing!)

Categories
Music

Tom Waits + Kool Keith

NASA, short for “North America South America,” is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).

Categories
Natural Science

15 Minute Warning

New Scientist has an article about a recent NASA-funded report into plasma ejections from the Sun that could potentially wipe out our power grids with fairly chilling consequences:

The incursion of the plasma into our atmosphere causes rapid changes in the configuration of Earth’s magnetic field which, in turn, induce currents in the long wires of the power grids. The grids were not built to handle this sort of direct current electricity. The greatest danger is at the step-up and step-down transformers used to convert power from its transport voltage to domestically useful voltage. The increased DC current creates strong magnetic fields that saturate a transformer’s magnetic core. The result is runaway current in the transformer’s copper wiring, which rapidly heats up and melts.

Given that pretty much everything we do relies on electricity (water, food and heat are fairly important not to mention the world’s financial markets, healthcare, communications, the Internet) the simultaneous destruction of transformers would leave us severaly impaired.

According to the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] report, the impact of what it terms a “severe geomagnetic storm scenario” could be as high as $2 trillion [for the US alone]. And that’s just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years.