Eric Hartwell's InfoWeb

Home

News

Tips

Tools

"Data! data! data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay."
— Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" by Arthur Conan Doyle.

"I like deadlines," cartoonist Scott Adams once said. "I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

"There is nothing like that feeling of spending days and days banging your head against a wall trying to solve a programming problem then suddenly finding that one tiny obscure and seemingly unrelated piece of the puzzle that unlocks the solution. Oh yeah!"

- Chris Maunder, CodeProject Newsletter 28 Jan 2002

"Management at eSnipe, which is me, is also feeling the pain of the 2002 bear market. So rather than pout about it, I bought some stuff on eBay that I really didn’t need, but made me feel better."

- Tom Campbell, president of eSnipe

Thursday, April 21, 2005

4:26:40 PM
Engineering Heroes
Apollo 13 Engineers Honored [AP 4/19/2005] A group of engineers was honored Tuesday for concocting a plan using plastic bags, cardboard and duct tape to save Apollo 13's astronauts after their spacecraft was crippled by an explosion 35 years ago. Engineers on the ground had to figure out a solution, and then tell the astronauts how to make the fix. Ed Smylie, who oversaw NASA's crew systems division in 1970, was glad the engineering side of the mission was being recognized. Smylie and other engineers soon had a proposed solution to retrofit the canisters, but it took a day or two to build a mock-up and get instructions to the crew. Among the biggest concerns was whether the astronauts had duct tape, Smylie said. He later learned duct tape was commonly used on the spacecraft to clean filters and for other tasks. "I felt like we were home free," he said. "One thing a Southern boy will never say is, 'I don't think duct tape will fix it.'"

11:42:54 AM
The Red, Red Hills of Mars (updated)
JPL has released a large, false-but-almost-real-color view assembled from frames taken by Spirit's panoramic camera on the rover's 454th martian day, or sol (April 13, 2005).

This view shows a region in the "Columbia Hills" slightly downhill from the rover. The view features two interesting outcrops in the middle distance and "Clark Hill" in the left background. The outcrop on the right, with rover tracks leading from it, is "Larry's Lookout." On the left is the Methuselah outcrop, with apparent layering.

More than 15 months and almost 5 km from its landing on Mars, NASA's Spirit rover is still going strong. This is a perspective view of the steepness of the "Columbia Hills," showing sites nicknamed "Tennessee Valley," "Larry's Lookout," "Inner Basin," "Home Plate," and the basin and summit beyond.

Original post: Spirit, Sol 455, Columbia Hills - NavCam, Right - 15:38:38 and 15:44:28 Local Solar. The black and white picture links to a full-sized 989K greyscale image. [Eric Hartwell's NewsStream 4/16/2005]