Gonna nerd out for a sec here, but this is one hell of a shot: It's a close-up from yesterday of the Phoenix lander descending through the Martian atmosphere, as seen by a satellite that just happened to be orbiting Mars at the time (the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, in fact). That is rad.
Just about as rad as this: a photo from one of the Mars rovers looking back at its discarded heat shield, next to one of the spots it bounced at whilst landing. And the SCIENCE they do isn't half bad, either.
4 comments:
Yeah I know, *crickets*.... but still, here's the full HiRISE photo of the landing. That's just f'ing spectacular.
Okay, while it is pretty cool that one of our things is taking pictures of another one of our things over there on another planet, I kind of feel that NASA has grown to rely too much on "Trust us, it's amazing." Would it be so insane for them to apportion a chunk of money from each mission budget to hire a big-name director to help them with their clips and releases? I mean, who in their right mind puts out footage like this to highlight their successes? And releasing stats about how landing a probe on Mars is like trying to shoot a lima bean with a burning rifle from sixty thousand miles away is just going over people's heads, because they've most likely never tried it. A proper filmmaker could show us how hard it is. They need to get over their obsession with the raw feed and invest in some editing equipment, and a real storyteller.
Not Michael Bay, though. I would like very much for Michael Bay to starve to death, please.
Really, they're just screwed. If NASA over produces everything the science becomes sensationalist crap, like those Discovery Channel extreme science shows. OR, they'll end up like CNN and have theme music for every new war-err, mission they do. They'd also get the conspiracy people all riled up if the production value goes too high. And you KNOW that if they added music they'd use the guy who made the new agey crap for STNG, and not someone good like Bear McCreary.
And did you see what the "phoenix" lander actually does? It's got a Tonka-toy excavator attached to it and it's going to dig up and analyze a tablespoon sized pile of dirt. Not too cool. Even if they do find evidence of life, all they'll have is another clip of scientists in matching shirts giving each other hugs. Otherwise it's just number arrays, line graphs, spectral analyses, and maybe a fossilized dot that might be bacteria dung. ...It would take someone like Steven Zaillian, the critically acclaimed director of Searching for Bobby Fischer, to make something that boring sound fun to most people.
And that's another thing. You don't see cars or electric razors named Spirit, Opportunity, or Phoenix, do you. No. NASA could start there so as not to make everything they do sound like part of the national anthem or a children's book.
Note, however, that they did get the guys who learned how to film without a steadycam for BSG to do this.
And Michael Bay can starve on the same island as Brian De Palma for doing Mission to Mars. FFS, my blood pressure skyrockets just thinking of that rotting, diabetic pile of shit.
I always thought NASA's naming problem coincided with the W Bush administration's tendency to name initiatives and military operations as if we were a nation of masturbating eight-year olds. I mean, was "Operation Infinite Justice" really supposed to scare anyone besides me?
Sweet video--although it's a lot more intense if you play this along with it.
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