SpaceBit

An Early Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

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MER-A Hanging On…

Below is a two-part image from The Planetary Society showing clean and dirty solar panels on MER-A (Spirit) on Mars. It is no wonder it is on the edge of survival. With luck, a small tornado will hit the rover and clean off the panels. It has happened before.

Dust cover on MER-A

Pine Island Glacier (PIG)

One of the destinations of the cruise is the Pine Island Glacier. PIG has been examined from space for a while now, but earlier this year the first people ever to see it in person arrived there to study it. Below is part one of a four part video series about the expedition (go to the Polar Palooza site for parts two and beyond).

Bindschadler, Holland, et al. are planning to return in 2009/2010 and beyond to deploy weather stations on the glacier, to drill through it, and to put sensors below it. If another team can collect data about the ocean water that is flowing to and from the glacier, it will provide a more comprehensive picture of the region. A boat is the perfect way to get close to the ocean side of the glacial terminus and deploy some buoys.

Any RSS to Google Maps with Python

Desire: I want to keep in touch with people during my upcoming trip to Antarctica, and I want you to get updates in whatever format you prefer (via email, on my site, with RSS, text messages, on a custom map or in a standard Google Map). Last time I went to Antarctica I blogged quite a bit (see 64 entries in ANDRILL category), including photos and videos.

Problem: I’ll be on a boat with no internet connection and a twice-per-day satellite connection limited to 25 KB/day of email. So for a 60 day cruise, I’ll be allowed slightly less than 1.5 megabytes transfer over the entire trip. The text of this post is around 1 KB, so I can write roughly 10 times this and read about 10 times this each day. I guess it isn’t that bad…

Solution: I’ve set up a system that provides the following behaviors, given that I can send email to one or more entities via To: Cc:, and Bcc: fields. Recipients can be individuals, this blog, or Twitter. Emails sent to individuals will go to their inbox. Email to this blog will be posted on the front page and show up on RSS. Emails to Twitter can be read on Twitter, your phone, or RSS. Any emails that end up in RSS that have geographic coordinates in them will be geocoded on my map.

None of this requires any programming skill except the mapping. I’ve written a small python script that will track an RSS feed and update the map if any posts contain geographic coordinates. If you are a programmer, read on to learn how it was done. If you aren’t enjoy the map…

Remaining Issue: All this is one-way, me-to-you. I won’t see comments made on this site, and they won’t be seen by anyone else because I moderate them (unless you’ve previously commented), so this site will be a one-way communication while I’m on the boat. If you want to communicate with me, the only way is by doing a direct Tweet (@mankoff) or private Tweet (d mankoff). Any emails will be read when I get off the boat in March.

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See where we have been. Look where we can go.

I was particularly interested in the last few minutes of the Obama acceptance speech last night when he discussed a 106 year old black female voter from South Carolina. He went over all the major events that she had witnessed our country had overcome, setting a stage for what we are capable of doing.

I was interested because it draws significant parallels to another motivational speech many of us have seen, and one I give frequently. As Obama did last night, the last few minutes of An Inconvenient Truth mentions slavery, women’s suffrage, the World Wars, segregation, MLK, cars and planes and the Moon, Berlin, Communism, and a few other environmental-specific events. Obama adds a “Yes We Can” between each event, and he is a better orator than Gore or I. But the examples and reasons for presenting them like that are the same.

I think I will be a bit embarrassed next time I give my version of AIT because it seems silly to try to compete with Obama as a motivational speaker. But I also realize I have a new event to discuss, one that can perhaps motivate people more than all the other historical images combined.

…Now I just need to have a discussion with Obama about this whole “clean coal” thing…

Voting from Space

Astronauts Fincke and Chamitoff will benefit from a Texas measure signed into law in 1997 by then Gov. George W. Bush that permits voters registered in the state to cast ballots from space.

Votes are beamed from the ISS on a secure electronic ballot and are forwarded to Texas elections officials for processing. (In at least one county, the votes are then transferred to a paper ballot on election night and commingled with ordinary voters’ ballots by elections officials, according to a National Public Radio report.)

Full story: link.

The Ship (Nathaniel B. Palmer)

Photograph by James Barker of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a helicopter, and a team of scientists. © 2000 James Barker

Some details about the boat: It is 93.9 meters (308 feet) long (a bit longer than a New York City block), can travel through one meter of ice at three knots, can work year-round in Antarctic seas (often stormy and ice-covered), and can stay out of port for up to 75 days at a time and carry around 70 people (crew + scientists). It has a heli-pad on the rear deck.

I haven’t been able to find out the height, but based on this image it is about 7 to 10 stories tall (see people and helicopter for scale).

Life on the ship includes a gym (with sauna) and laundry on each deck, and a two-person berth with a shower for each crew member. There are five meals a day from 0730 to 0030, and people are active (science and operations) twenty-four hours a day.

Oil Prices

Price of broccoli (from FreshDirect) converted to equivalent value in barrels of crude oil

If you are interested in sustainability and reducing your oil consumption, you should install the Oil Standard Firefox Plugin. It converts all prices on all web pages (Amazon.com, Airlines, your online bank, FreshDirect, etc.) to the current equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. Note that this doesn’t know anything about the actual oil usage of an item (production, transport, etc.)

Antarctica v2.0

I’m going back to Antarctica. This time I’ll be on a boat, around the Peninsula, January and February 2009. We’ll be studying the ocean, the air, and the ice in the region. There will be robots that swim under the ice sheets, and sensors thrown overboard and collected to sample sea water, and meteorological stations deployed, and lots of other stuff that I’ll write about here as I learn more.

Right now I’m going through the physical qualification (PQ) testing again (a thorough health checkup). Last time, each checkbox, EKG, and needle was full of excitement. This time it is just a bunch of forms that need to be completed.

Python and wxPython

I’ve recently started developing code with the Python programming language. Prior to coding I had to install the language (Python) toolkits (wxWidgets and wxPython) and tools (py2app, py2exe, wxGlade). I have a *nix computer background so rather than downloading a binary installer I opted to build everything from source on my OS X box. It took quite a while to get it all set up correctly, so I’m documenting it here in case anyone else finds themselves in the same situation.

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