We stumble across countless tech demos and flashy designs every week, but they usually leave us thinking little more than "that's cool." /dev/fort's new
Spacelog is a spectacularly organized and designed site documenting the Apollo 13 and Mercury 6 missions. The site pulls from NASA missions' original
radio transcripts, and displays communications like status updates -- yes, the "
Houston, we've had a problem" line is there. It's all intuitively searchable and linkable, making it easy to relive
John Glenn describing Earth's horizon on the Mercury mission. You can access mini-biographies for everyone from CAPCOM (Capsule Communicator) to Jim Lovell, Jr. Projects like these remind us just how amazing the Internet can be.
http://xml.channel.aol.com/xmlpublisher/fetch.v2.xml?option=expand_relative_urls&dataUrlNodes=uiConfig,feedConfig,entry&id=614450&pid=614449&uts=1291951476
http://cdn.channel.aol.com/cs_feed_v1_6/csfeedwrapper.swf
The 5 Greatest Planet-Exploring Robots
Luna 9
Two and a half years before Neil Armstrong's giant leap, the Soviets' unmanned Luna 9 probe touched down on the surface of the Moon on February 3, 1966. For three days, it beamed back the first videos and panoramic photos from a heavenly body.
If its mission succeeds in 2012, NASA's latest Mars rover, the newly christened Curiosity will join an elite group of robots that have managed to touch down safely on an alien world. Click through to see Curiosity's five greatest forbearers.
Luna 9
Two and a half years before Neil Armstrong's giant leap, the Soviets' unmanned Luna 9 probe touched down on the surface of the Moon on February 3, 1966. For three days, it beamed back the first videos and panoramic photos from a heavenly body.
Venera 7
On August 17, 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 probe crash-landed on Venus and became the first spacecraft to survey our nearest planetary neighbor. What it found wasn't pretty: A hellish world with metal-melting temperatures of 475 degrees Fahrenheit and crushing atmospheric pressure 93 times greater than Earth's.
Viking 1 and 2
After three attempts by the USSR, NASA succeeded in landing the first robot on Mars when Viking 1 touched down on July 20, 1976. (Its sibling, Viking 2, landed on September 3.) Although designed for a 90-day mission, the landers spent over 6 years surveying the planet.
NEAR Shoemaker
On February 14 , 2000, Shoemaker locked into orbit around 433 Eros, an asteroid orbiting just past Mars. Though Shoemaker wasn't designed to land on Eros, NASA engineers successfully plunked it down on the rock after its one-year mission.
Huygens Saturn Probe
A joint American-European mission touched-down a probe called Huygens on the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, on January 14, 2005. Nearly half the size of Earth, Titan is the only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere -- which allowed Huygens to make a leisurely two-and-a-half-hour parachute descent while measuring the atmosphere and snapping photos of the terrain. It continued to send back data for an hour and ten minutes after it landed.
Tags: apollo 13, Apollo13, design, devfort, mercury 6, Mercury6, nasa, space, spacelog, top, web
Comments
4
Subscribe to commentsHambrookartDec 10th 2010 12:21PM
wow
HAROLDDec 10th 2010 2:13PM
I can't help but wonder ,"How Much Does Each Mission Costs Taxpayers "?? I personally "DID NOT LOSE ANYTHING UP IN SPACE" !! and resent my tax dollars being used in that manner !!
Virginia IndependentDec 10th 2010 2:46PM
@HAROLD - when NASA started the program, a computer took up the whole floor of a very big building. We had rotary dial phones, uncomfortable and BIG cars, and the knowledge our future generations would look forward to was limited. Today my i-phone has more power than the computers on Apollo 13. You live a better life in a safer car, have communications capabilities (like your ability to express yourself on the Internet), a computer to do the mind numbing calculations we once did on a slide rule, and chemistry that brought you kevlar, plexiglass, new plastics, better insulation and too much more to imagine. Our future generations will have more technology than ever imagined, and will explore the far reaches of this planet (we have only explores 5% of the oceans) OK you did not want your tax dollars to go there - so please turn off you TV, your Cell Phone, your Computer, your GPS your air bags in your car, and don't bother to go to Starbucks. Find a tent in the woods and live your life.
What ever you think about the actual missions into space, the technology that was sparked by NASA and JFK's vision to land a man safely on the moon and return by 1969 is what we spent our money on.
It took from the dawn of time until 1956 for man to conquer Mt Everest. It only took 13 more years to land on the moon. I hope you read this on your computer, and watch your favorite programs on a flat screen TV. Enjoy what your taxes and our creative minds have done.
EdPetProdDec 10th 2010 4:48PM
@Virginia Independent A-MEN