Posts tagged earth day
Future of Antartica — Greener and More Robots
The future of Antarctica is greener, cheaper and will probably involve more sharing.
Oh, and more robots.
Those are some of the likely recommendations of a blue ribbon panel looking at how the United States will conduct science on the frozen continent during the next two decades.
The U.S. spends about $380 million each year to support more than 1,200 scientists and support personnel in Antarctica. The last time officials did this big a review, they decided to build a new base at the South Pole and a one-square kilometer neutrino observatory under the ice cap.
Photo: A penguin on Snow Island, Antarctica. Corbis
Before Earth Day approaches let us celebrate Earth Night with a video of time-lapse imagery from the International Space Station. A big thank you to Roger Weiss, technical integration specialist for the ISS, for alerting us to today’s great show from ReelNASA.
PHOTOS: Earth Perspectives Through the Ages
The sequences in the video are stitched together from photographs taken by the Expedition 30 crew aboard ISS and show the following (a tag appears as well on the lower left of the screen during the video):
:01 — Stars over southern United States
:08 — US west coast to Canada
:21 — Central Europe to the Middle East
:36 — Aurora Australis over the Indian Ocean
:54 — Storms over Africa
1:08 — Central United States
1:20 — Midwest United States
1:33 — United Kingdom to Baltic Sea
1:46 — Moonset
1:55 — Northern United States to Eastern Canada
2:12 — Aurora Australis over the Indian Ocean
2:32 — Comet Lovejoy
2:53 — Aurora Borealis over Hudson Bay
3:06 — United Kingdom to Central Europe
The song “Walking in the Air,” by Howard Blake, is especially chosen for its lyrics:
Forty years ago this week, the crew of Apollo 16 captured this (top) image of Earth rising above the lunar landscape. The Apollo missions enabled us to see for the first time our planet as it appears from space.
“When I was orbiting the moon and could put my thumb up to the window and completely cover the Earth, I felt a real sense of my own insignificance. Everything I’d ever known could be hidden behind my thumb,” Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell said.
In the bottom image, Moscow is seen at night from the International Space Station, flying at an altitude of approximately 240 miles on March 28, 2012. A solar array panel for the space station is on the left side of the frame. The Aurora Borealis, airglow and daybreak frame the horizon.
Through the ages, humans have attempted to understand and portray the world around them. Here’s a look at the myriad ways people have attempted to understand.
