Reader Jon kindly reminded me this morning (after letting me know last week) that NASA’s InSight “stationary lander”,  launched from Earth on May 5, will—if all goes well—touch down today at about 20:00 UTC (3 p.m. Eastern time in the U.S.). The distance of the journey: over 301 million miles!

The lander is basically a probe that drills down 16 feet to take Mars’s temperature, but it will take 2-3 months to put that probe in place after landing.

Jon added more information and some links; I’ll remind you about 15 minutes before the lander touches down.

Live landing commentary on NASA TV will run from 19:00-20:30 UTC (1-2:30 p.m. CEN). InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, will conduct an in-depth study of the interior of Mars: its crust, mantle, and core.

Here’s a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory description of the InSight landing (similar to the Curiosity rover touch down) and an animation of the landing from Lockheed Martin who designed and built InSight. (has a silly ending with Insight “speaking” with an alluring female voice?).

(Unrelated but pretty amazing, European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst made a time-lapse video from the cupola on the ISS of the Russian Progress MS-10 cargo ship as it launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 16 November.)

Here’s a high-speed film the Apollo 11 rocket, the Saturn 5, taking off on its way to the Moon on July 16, 1969.  We see 30 seconds of actual time, but it’s slowed down to last nearly 9 minutes by the filming, done at 500 frames per second. The lunar module landed on in the (British) evening four days later and then, six hours thereafter—roughly 3 a.m. UTC (formerly GMT)—Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the Moon. If you were alive then, as I was, you were watching it live.

I’m still amazed that humans could do this, but this bit, the launch, is new to me. The narration is really good.

Astronaut Alan Bean (born 1932), the fourth person to walk on the Moon, died yesterday at age 86. His moonwalk was in 1969, and, after participating in the Skylab program, he retired in 1975 to devote himself to painting. Here’s a photo of him on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission:

Bart Sibrel is an infamous Moon-landing denialist who has made ludicrous movies about his theory that the CIA faked all the landings; the Wikipedia article linked to his name details some of the problems with Sibrel’s ideas. He’s also confronted several of the astronauts, asking them to swear on the Bible that they went to the Moon. (Sibrel appears to be religious, as you can see in the Buzz Aldrin video at bottom, so I don’t know what he thinks when someone like Bean actually does swear on the Bible! Would he change his mind? Clearly not!).

At any rate, here’s a video posted by Bo Gardiner showing Sibrel asking Bean to swear on the Bible that he walked on the Moon (after looking at pictures of Sibrel, I think he’s wearing a wig here). The video notes:

By misrepresenting himself as a legitimate “documentary” filmmaker, Bart Sibrel (famously punched by Buzz Aldrin) invaded Alan’s home in 2004 and took advantage of the astronaut’s down-home gentility. Even as Sibrel’s nasty craziness became increasingly obnoxious, Alan generously humored him. But the easygoing gentleman had his limits, and he showed this creep the door with the most gracious of f-yous.

It’s beyond my ken why people think that all the Moon landings are fake, as that would be an expensive piece of fakery! And why would the CIA fake this? (I could look up why Sibrel thinks this, but I can’t be arsed as he’s a bull-goose looney).

Sibrel’s most famous confrontation was with Buzz Aldrin, described by Wikipedia below and shown in the video. Aldrin, who I believe was in his eighties when he was confronted, threw a heavy punch at Sibrel. I can understand why an astronaut who risked his life to perform this risky feat would be really pissed off when confronted by a jerk like Sibrel, but I can’t countenance physical violence. Still, watch the video below, which shows you the religious motivations underlying Sibrel’s endeavors (as you can hear on this and other videos, Sibrel asks “Do you think you can get to Heaven without repenting?”).

Sibrel confronted several Apollo astronauts, who did not respond positively when they realized that they were being challenged on their accredited achievement of landing and walking on the Moon.^[1 The most infamous incident involved Apollo 11 crew member Buzz Aldrin. According to Aldrin, he was lured to a Beverly Hills, California, hotel on September 9, 2002, under the pretext of an interview on space for a Japanese children’s television show. As he was leaving the hotel, Sibrel was there requesting that he swear an oath on a Bible that he had walked on the Moon.

When Aldrin refused, Sibrel followed him and said “you’re the one who said you walked on the moon when you didn’t”, and then called Aldrin “a coward, and a liar, and a thief”. Aldrin, after asking Sibrel “will you get out of my way for me?”, reacted by punching Sibrel in the jaw, while being recorded by Sibrel’s camera crew. Sibrel later attempted to use the tape to convince police and prosecutors that he was the victim of an assault. However, it was decided that Aldrin had been provoked and no charges were filed. Many talk shows aired the clip, usually siding with Aldrin’s response. Sibrel said later that he wrote a letter of apology to Aldrin for speaking to him harshly.

Before this incident, Sibrel had interviewed Aldrin in a hotel room, as shown in Sibrel’s film Astronauts Gone Wild. During the interview, after Sibrel confronted Aldrin with a videotape containing, according to Sibrel, newly discovered footage from the Apollo 11 mission, Aldrin replied: “Well, you’re talking to the wrong guy! Why don’t you talk to the administrator at NASA? We were passengers, we’re guys going on a flight.”

The Chinese space station Tiangong-1 is supposed to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere at about 12:30 a.m. UTC, or about 1.7 hours from this posting.  It’s not clear exactly where it’ll land, or if any pieces will make it to Earth, but the latest prognostication is somewhere off the west coast of South America.

It’s been up there for 6.5 years, and there is no longer human control of its orbit.  Go to this site to follow its progress, and see the video below for the story up to now. Here’s the live feed, courtesy of reader Peter N (see comments):

The background:

h/t: Tim

Reader Paulina from Poland called my attention to this live feed from the International Space Station (ISS), a feed I didn’t know existed.  If you look right now, it appears to show a spacewalk. But it also, as always, shows the curvature of the Earth.

But the weird thing about it is this warning at the bottom of the notes:

WHAT THE HELL? We have to give warnings to flat-Earthers now? The world has truly gone to hell. Pinker was wrong after all.

Oh, and flat-Earthism isn’t a “Theory”. It’s a crazy speculation that is wrong.

I still remember that when John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, did his three circuits in 1962, it took about ninety minutes per orbit. Apparently that’s still the case, and this video, made from photos taken by the International Space Station, shows a complete orbit in real time. It’s 92½ minutes long, and mesmerizing.  You might just want to put it on your screen (leave the music on if you won’t give yourself away!) and let it roll.  Matthew, who sent it to me, gives more information:

Made by Seán Doran using NASA images (with a Joyce quote at the beginning). Crank up the sound and watch in full screen, (lasts 90 mins!) Spot the geographical locations, too.

Extra points if you identify the Joyce quote, and super-extra points if you give its significance in the book. Oh, and look below the video for more information from YouTube.

More stuff;

Orbit is a real time reconstruction of time lapse photography taken on board the International Space Station by NASA’s Earth Science & Remote Sensing Unit.

The structure of the film is built around a nested selection of Phaeleh’s last three albums; Lost Time, Illusion of the Tale & Somnus. The tone & pacing of each track influenced the choice of material used.

Typically each time lapse sequence was photographed at 1 frame per second.

Each sequence was processed in Photoshop. A dirtmap was made in order to repair dust, blemishes and hot pixel artifacts that would otherwise confuse the re-timing phase of the workflow resulting in strobes and distracting blurs.

Image processing techniques were used to emphasize features on the Earth’s surface. Every sequence consists of a number of layers that when masked, processed & blended correctly produce the final look of each shot.

To make sure each sequence was recreated faithfully to the actual rate of speed observed I referenced time-stamps on the first and last frame in the sequence and used frame interpolation software to produce the other 59 frames.

The length of the film is exactly the length of time it takes ISS to orbit the Earth once, 92 minutes & 39 seconds.

Here’s the video of Tuesday’s SpaceX launch, which I was unable to watch live as I was being interviewed (more on that later).  The Falcon Heavy launch was successful in nearly every way (one of the three boosters, supposed to land on a platform at sea, crashed). The synchronized landing of the other two boosters, shown below, is a marvel of human engineering. And, of course, the coolest part was putting Elon Musk’s red Tesla, complete with a test dummy, into orbit. That’s shown in the third video, and I wonder how long it’s going to orbit. Will it disintegrate or get hit by something? As CNN reported:

On board the rocket that’s now headed deeper into space is Musk’s personal Tesla (TSLA) roadster. At the wheel is a dummy dressed in a spacesuit. Musk said in December the car would play David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on repeat. Cameras on board the car show it cruising by Earth, which appears as a big blue orb in the background. Musk plans to send the car into orbit around the sun.

He announced last year he planned to put his car on the inaugural Falcon Heavy flight. When asked on Twitter why he wanted to throw away a $100,000 vehicle, he replied, “I love the thought of a car drifting apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future.”

Here’s a 43-minute video of the whole event, from launch to landing (if you want a shorter version, go here):

The booster landing—amazing! Listen for the sonic booms.

And a live view of the Tesla with the dummy “Starman”. Note the “Don’t panic” sign from “Hitchhiker’s Guide”: