The Practicality And Ingenuity Shown With These Radiators Is Inspiring. I Love The Multiple Use Of The

What Makes the Artemis Moon Mission NASA's Next Leap Forward?

When NASA astronauts return to the Moon through Artemis, they will benefit from decades of innovation, research, and technological advancements. We’ll establish long-term lunar science and exploration capabilities at the Moon and inspire a new generation of explorers—the Artemis Generation.

Meet the Space Launch System rocket, or SLS. This next-generation super heavy-lift rocket was designed to send astronauts and their cargo farther into deep space than any rocket we’ve ever built. During liftoff, SLS will produce 8.8 million pounds (4 million kg) of maximum thrust, 15 percent more than the Saturn V rocket.

SLS will launch the Orion spacecraft into deep space. Orion is the only spacecraft capable of human deep space flight and high-speed return to Earth from the vicinity of the Moon. More than just a crew module, Orion has a launch abort system to keep astronauts safe if an emergency happens during launch, and a European-built service module, which is the powerhouse that fuels and propels Orion and keeps astronauts alive with water, oxygen, power, and temperature control.

Orion and SLS will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with help from Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) teams. EGS operates the systems and facilities necessary to process and launch rockets and spacecraft during assembly, transport, launch, and recovery.

The knowledge we've gained while operating the International Space Station has opened new opportunities for long-term exploration of the Moon's surface. Gateway, a vital component of our Artemis plans, is a Moon-orbiting space station that will serve as a staging post for human expeditions to the lunar surface. Crewed and uncrewed landers that dock to Gateway will be able to transport crew, cargo, and scientific equipment to the surface.

Our astronauts will need a place to live and work on the lunar surface. Artemis Base Camp, our first-ever lunar science base, will include a habitat that can house multiple astronauts and a camper van-style vehicle to support long-distance missions across the Moon’s surface. Apollo astronauts could only stay on the lunar surface for a short while. But as the Artemis base camp evolves, the goal is to allow crew to stay at the lunar surface for up to two months at a time.

The Apollo Program gave humanity its first experience traveling to a foreign world. Now, America and the world are ready for the next era of space exploration. NASA plans to send the first woman and first person of color to the lunar surface and inspire the next generation of explorers.

Our next adventure starts when SLS and Orion roar off the launch pad with Artemis I. Together with commercial and international partners, NASA will establish a long-term presence on the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars. Everything we’ve learned, and everything we will discover, will prepare us to take the next giant leap: sending the first astronauts to Mars.

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Get Space-Crafty with Earth Science!

It’s time to get space-crafty! (Get it?) We’re getting ready to launch Landsat 9 into space this fall, and we want to know, how does Landsat inspire you?

For nearly 50 years, Landsat satellites have been collecting important data and taking beautiful images of Earth, as a partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Scientists and policy makers alike use this data to understand climate change, deforestation, the growth of cities, and so much more.

In celebration of the Landsat 9 launch in September, we are calling all crafters to create space-crafts inspired by your favorite Landsat image! From watercolor paintings to needlework to frosted cakes, let your creativity flow and show us how you see Landsat images.

Post a picture of your craft on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook with the hashtag #LandsatCraft. We will spotlight some on social media!

For a little inspiration, here are some #LandsatCraft examples from some of the people who work with Landsat:

“Looking through the Visible Earth Landsat gallery for inspiration, I saw the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) and knew immediately what I had to do -- recreate it in a mosaic of my own. LIMA is a composite of more than 1,000 cloud-free Landsat 7 images of Antarctica, and when it was released in 2007 it was our first high resolution, true-color look at the icy continent.” – Kate Ramsayer, NASA Landsat Communications Coordinator

“I love embroidering satellite imagery and NASA data. For Landsat, I wanted something with lots of straight lines -- much easier to stitch! -- and crop fields like these fit the bill. It’s amazing how clearly we can see the influence of human activities in satellite imagery like this. It’s a constant reminder of the effect we have on our home planet.” – Katy Mersmann, Earth Science Social Media Lead

“We didn’t have the discipline or the organizational skills to do any of the really, really fancy images, like Lena Delta, so we chose Garden City, Kansas in 1972. We added a model of Landsat 1, too.” – Ryan Fitzgibbons, Earth Science Producer, and Charles Fitzgibbons, Age 8

"I was inspired by this Landsat image which demonstrates how we can use satellite imagery to remotely monitor cover crop performance, a sustainable farming practice that promotes soil health. Since I began working with NASA Harvest, NASA's Food Security and Agriculture Program, I've come to understand the critical importance of conservation agriculture and resilient farmlands in support of a food secure future for all, especially in the face of a changing climate." – Mary Mitkish, NASA Harvest Communications Lead

“I chose particular ingredients that represent the Landsat qualities that we celebrate:

The base spirit is gin because Landsat data is clean and precise. Vermouth represents our foreign collaborators. Using both lemon and lime juices signifies the diverse uses of the data. The ginger is for the land we study. The apple, well, because it’s American. The club soda makes it a long drink, for the long data record.” – Matthew Radcliff, NASA Landsat Producer

“Last year for the 50th Earth Day, I created this poster, inspired by our views of river deltas -- many captured by Landsat satellites -- which are particularly beautiful and evocative of water coursing through our land like a circulation system of nature. In 2000, Landsat 7 took one of my favorite images of the Lena Delta, which is the basis for this art.” – Jenny Mottar, Art Director for NASA Science

Are you feeling inspired to create yet? We’re so excited to see your #LandsatCraft projects! Follow NASA Earth on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to see if your art is shared!

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5 posts!

True story. My author/journalist/landlady took a trip to the States, met up with my college student friend to be shown the US college student life, and then pushed her into putting her credit card details into her Uber app.

Then over the course of the remainder of her trip she used my friend’s card to pay for her Uber trips until the money ran out.

The kicker to this story is that she wants 10k in upfront heating gas costs for the year because of “the war”.

Why are rich people so bad at money?

Adobe steals your color

When a company breaks a product you rely on — wrecking decades of work — it’s natural to feel fury. Companies know this, so they try to deflect your rage by blaming their suppliers. Sometimes, it’s suppliers who are at fault — but other times, there is plenty of blame to go around.

For example, when Apple deleted all the working VPNs from its Chinese App Store and backdoored its Chinese cloud servers, it blamed the Chinese government. But the Chinese state knew that Apple had locked its devices so that its Chinese customers couldn’t install third-party apps.

That meant that an order to remove working VPNs and apps that used offshore clouds from the App Store would lock Apple customers into Chinese state surveillance. The order to block privacy tools was a completely foreseeable consequence of Apple’s locked-down “ecosystem.”

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

In 2013, Adobe started to shift its customers to the cloud, replacing apps like Photoshop and Illustrator with “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”) versions that you would have to pay rent on, every month, month after month, forever. It’s not hard to understand why this was an attractive proposition for Adobe!

Adobe, of course, billed its SaaS system as good for its customers — rather than paying thousands of dollars for its software up front, you could pay a few dollars (anywhere from $10-$50) every month instead. Eventually, of course, you’d end up paying more, assuming these were your professional tools, which you expected to use for the rest of your life.

For people who work in prepress, a key part of their Adobe tools is integration with Pantone. Pantone is a system for specifying color-matching. A Pantone number corresponds to a specific tint that’s either made by mixing the four standard print colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, AKA “CMYK”), or by applying a “spot” color. Spot colors are added to print jobs after the normal CMYK passes — if you want a stripe of metallic gold or a blob of hot pink, you specify its Pantone number and the printer loads up a separate ink and runs your media through its printer one more time.

Pantone wants to license this system out, so it needs some kind of copyrightable element. There aren’t many of these in the Pantone system! There’s the trademark, but that’s a very thin barrier. Trademark has a broad “nominative use” exception: it’s not a trademark violation to say, “Pantone 448C corresponds to the hex color #4a412a.”

Perhaps there’s a copyright? Well yes, there’s a “thin” database copyright on the Pantone values and their ink equivalents. Anyone selling a RIP or printer that translates Pantone numbers to inks almost certainly has to license Pantone’s copyright there. And if you wanted to make an image-editing program that conveyed the ink data to a printer, you’d best take a license.

All of this is suddenly relevant because it appears that things have broken down between Adobe and Pantone. Rather than getting Pantone support bundled in with your Adobe apps, you must now pay $21/month for a Pantone plugin.

https://twitter.com/funwithstuff/status/1585850262656143360

Remember, Adobe’s apps have moved to the cloud. Any change that Adobe makes in its central servers ripples out to every Adobe user in the world instantaneously. If Adobe makes a change to its apps that you don’t like, you can’t just run an older version. SaaS vendors like to boast that with cloud-based apps, “you’re always running the latest version!”

The next version of Adobe’s apps will require you to pay that $21/month Pantone fee, or any Pantone-defined colors in your images will render as black. That’s true whether you created the file last week or 20 years ago.

Doubtless, Adobe will blame Pantone for this, and it’s true that Pantone’s greed is the root cause here. But this is an utterly foreseeable result of Adobe’s SaaS strategy. If Adobe’s customers were all running their apps locally, a move like this on Pantone’s part would simply cause every affected customer to run older versions of Adobe apps. Adobe wouldn’t be able to sell any upgrades and Pantone wouldn’t get any license fees.

But because Adobe is in the cloud, its customers don’t have that option. Adobe doesn’t have to have its users’ backs because if it caves to Pantone, users will still have to rent its software every month, and because that is the “latest version,” those users will also have to rent the Pantone plugin every month — forever.

What’s more, while there may not be any licensable copyright in a file that simply says, “Color this pixel with Pantone 448C” (provided the program doesn’t contain ink-mix descriptions), Adobe’s other products — its RIPs and Postscript engines — do depend on licensable elements of Pantone, so the company can’t afford to tell Pantone to go pound sand.

Like the Chinese government coming after Apple because they knew that any change that Apple made to its service would override its customers’ choices, Pantone came after Adobe because they knew that SaaS insulated Adobe from its customers’ wrath.

Adobe customers can’t even switch to its main rival, Figma. Adobe’s just dropped $20b to acquire that company and ensure that its customers can’t punish it for selling out by changing vendors.

Pantone started out as a tech company: a way to reliably specify ink mixes in different prepress houses and print shops. Today, it’s an “IP” company, where “IP” means “any law or policy that allows me to control the conduct of my customers, critics or competitors.”

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That’s likewise true of Adobe. The move to SaaS is best understood as a means to exert control over Adobe’s customers and competitors. Combined with anti-competitive killer acquisitions that gobble up any rival that manages to escape this control, and you have a hostage situation that other IP companies like Pantone can exploit.

A decade or so ago, Ginger Coons created Open Colour Standard, an attempt to make an interoperable alternative to Pantone. Alas, it seems dormant today:

http://adaptstudio.ca/ocs/

Owning colors is a terrible idea and technically, it’s not possible to do so. Neither UPS Brown nor John Deere Green are “owned” in any meaningful sense, but the companies certainly want you to believe that they are. Inspired by them and Pantone, people with IP brain-worms keep trying to turn colors into property:

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

The law is clear that colors aren’t property, but by combining SaaS, copyright, trademark, and other tech and policies, it is becoming increasingly likely that some corporation will stealing the colors out from under our very eyes.

[Image ID: A Pantone swatchbook; it slowly fades to grey, then to black.]

5 Ways Studying Water Will Help Us Better Understand Earth

Studying our home planet is just as powerful as exploring what’s beyond it.

Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) is a joint mission developed by NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. It will track water on more than 90% of Earth’s surface and help communities, scientists, and researchers better understand this finite and vital resource. And it’s launching this month!

So how will SWOT help us better understand Earth? Here are 5 ways.

SWOT will address some of the most pressing climate change questions of our time.

An important part of predicting our future climate is determining at what point Earth’s ocean water slows down its absorption of the excess heat in the atmosphere and starts releasing that heat back into the air, where it could accelerate global warming. SWOT will provide crucial information about this global heat exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere, enabling researchers to test and improve future climate forecasts.

The satellite will also offer insights to improve computer models for sea level rise projections and coastal flood forecasting.

Data from SWOT will additionally help scientists, engineers, water managers, and others better monitor drought conditions in lakes and reservoirs and improve flood forecasts for rivers.

SWOT is the first satellite mission that will observe nearly all water on the planet’s surface.

SWOT will measure the height of water in Earth’s lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and the ocean, giving scientists the ability to track the movement of water around the world.

SWOT’s eye in the sky will provide a truly global view of the water on more than 90% of Earth’s surface, enriching humankind’s understanding of how the ocean reacts to and influences climate change along with what potential hazards – including floods – lie ahead in different regions of the world.

SWOT will see Earth’s water in higher definition than ever before.

Because everything is better in HD 😉, SWOT will view Earth’s ocean and freshwater bodies with unprecedented clarity compared to other satellites, much like a high-definition television delivers a picture far more detailed than older models. This means that SWOT will be able to “see” ocean features – like fronts and eddies – that are too small for current space-based instruments to detect. Those measurements will help improve researchers’ understanding of the ocean’s role in climate change.

Not only will the satellite show where – and how fast – sea level is rising, it will also reveal how coastlines around the world are changing. It will provide similar high-definition clarity for Earth’s lakes, rivers, and reservoirs, many of which remain a mystery to researchers, who aren’t able to outfit every water body with monitoring instruments.

SWOT data will be used to help make decisions about our daily lives and livelihoods.

As climate change accelerates the water cycle, more communities around the world will be inundated with water while others won’t have enough. SWOT data will be used to monitor drought conditions and improve flood forecasts, providing essential information to water management agencies, disaster preparedness agencies, universities, civil engineers, and others who need to track water in their local areas. SWOT data also will help industries, like shipping, by providing measurements of water levels along rivers, as well as ocean conditions, including tides, currents, and storm surges.

Finally … SWOT will pave the way for future Earth missions.

With its innovative technology and commitment to engaging a diverse community of people who plan to use data from the mission, SWOT is blazing a trail for future Earth-observing missions. SWOT’s data and the tools to support researchers in analyzing the information will be free and accessible. This will help to foster research and applications activities by a wide range of users, including scientists, resource managers, and others who in the past may not have had the opportunity to access this kind of information. Lessons learned from SWOT will lead to new questions and improvements for future missions, including our upcoming Earth System Observatory, a constellation of missions focused on studying key aspects of our home planet.

Keep track of the mission here. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Honey Fungus Armillaria mellea

GUYS!!!!! IT'S GOING TO LAUNCH IN FIVE MINUTES!!!

I'M BEING SERIOUS