today is july 16th, and 40 years ago nasa launched a rocket called the apollo 11. on july 20th, 4 days later, one of the crewmembers, neil armstrong, stepped on the moon. he was the first human being to ever do so. there’s a website that’s apparently celebrating the anniversary of this by reliving the launch of apollo 11. it’s called wechoosethemoon.org.

the website is going to let viewers experience the event with messages from the astronauts, photographs, audio recordings and more. in about 9 hours from this posting, it will go into its second “stage” – the launch.

i was born in 1987, so i wasn’t alive when this happened. but for a couple of years now i’ve been pretty interested in astronomy, including going to some telescope viewings of the moon and mars at college. i know that i’ll definitely be keeping tabs on this website to see these things unfold. for me, it’s still really incredible to think about just what a tremendous step forward for mankind the event was – not just for technology and science, but because it encapsulated mankind’s determination for progress. by literally sending a man to the moon, we showed the world not only that we had the means to do such a thing, but we had a vision for it as well, and that if we worked hard enough we could persevere and someday achieve our dreams, and touch the stars if we wanted to.

the website is wechoosethemoon.org.

the Daily Galaxy is one of my favorite websites. it’s a news blog, but it covers mainly science topics, as well as some pop culture. much of the articles deal with astronomy, and another portion deal with nature and humanity. it’s essentially a one-stop place for everything that’s going on right now in the galaxy: from earth to the far reaches of outer space.

if you’re at all interested in nerdy stuff like learning stuff like how Jupiter is saving us all from mass extinction or what’s the deal with global warming, did we cause it? or what does a shark and a serial killer have in common? (hint: they’re both being monitored by the government!) or is that bird looking through your clothes, or just staring at the earth’s magnetic field? or are we alone in the universe? … then i highly recommend checking out this website. every day!

They found ice on Mars!

From Article:
If Smith and his team are right, the find means at the very least that real, liquid water – absolutely essential for life as we know it – could have existed on the Red Planet when it was warmer millions or billions of years ago, and suggests that Mars may once have had a “habitable” environment.

“Ice is a great preserver,” Smith said, “and it’s one of the building blocks of life.”

But whether this Martian ice has preserved any evidence, or even a suggestion, of ancient life remains the unknown of all unknowns. Phoenix can’t really provide the answer because its chemistry instruments can only detect organic chemicals and not whether they ever were parts of living organisms.

The scientists on the Phoenix team have given fanciful names to small patches of the surface where they plan to dig into the soil. One, for instance, is called Humpty Dumpty, and King of Hearts is another. But this presumed ice patch bears a much more exciting moniker.

Its name is “Holy Cow!” Smith said.

The Phoenix spacecraft’s robotic arm holds a bucket designed to scoop soil samples for analysis by the lander’s chemistry instruments, and the bucket carries both a camera and a tiny rasp to scrape chips of ice from the exposed material.

Smith said that this week – when the robotic arm starts digging – some of the ice chips will be melted and combined with small samples of sterile water that Phoenix carried from Earth in order to assess the salinity and chemistry of the newfound Martian ice.

On Friday in the journal Science, scientists from Harvard and Stony Brook universities reported that Martian rocks analyzed by the Rover Opportunity showed that any water that might have existed on Mars would have been far too salty for any Earth-like organisms to survive there.

But Smith said the sensitive instruments aboard Phoenix will be able to measure even the highest possible levels of salinity in the ice, and he noted that on Earth the saltiest environments – like the Great Salt Lake and other known regions of intense brine – do harbor many species of salt-loving microbes.

The robotic arm’s camera is the high-tech tool of Horst Uwe Keller, who is in Tucson from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. The camera, Keller said, can use its light-emitting diodes to illuminate the ice surface for highly accurate full-color stereo images, and Keller said even the first black and white images show that the bright slab beneath the lander is much brighter than any of the surrounding soil.

Full Article: here