Spinoffs

by Tim Spooner


Zilla Leutenegger – der mann im mond – 2000

This is how the moon looked like in 1885 when James Hall Nasmyth and James Carpenter educated their eye with the help of a telescope “not only in respect to comprehending the general character of the moon’s surface, but also to examining minutely its marvellous details under every variety of phase, in the hope of rightly understanding their true nature, as well as the causes which had produced them.” This and more on the cosmical origin of the planets of the solar system, on existence and non-existence of a lunar atmosphere can be read in their wonderful book “The moon considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite”

More education for the eyes was done in 1966 by the Five ‘Lunar Orbiter’ missions. With the help of these tools:

within a few days 99% of the Moon was photographed with a resolution of 60 m or better:

and within 3 weeks they were transmitted to Earth as analog data after onboard scanning of the original film into a series of strips. The data were written to magnetic tape and also to film.
In 2007, with the help of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) began a process to convert the Lunar Orbiter Images directly from the original Ampex FR-900 analog video recordings of the spacecraft data to digital image format, a change which provided vastly improved resolution over the original images released in the 1960s. Due to the state of the art marvellous details of the moon currently looking like this:

highest resolution is availiable here

1948 Claude Shannon with his “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” maintained the staples to squeeze information into the binary space.

“How is an information source to be described mathematically, and how much information in bits per second is produced in a given source? The main point at issue is the effect of statistical knowledge about the source in reducing the required capacity of the channel, by the use of proper encoding of the information.”

2009 Patrick McGuire and astronauts with artificial-intelligence enhanced spacesuits trying to get them back by fishing with a Hopfield neural network:

Read more about the Future enhancements to the Cyborg Astrobiologist system that will help identify both carbon and non-carbon forms of life here

John Callas – Five Years of Cruising on Mars

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

More questions & answers by John Callas on
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/jpl-mer20090112.html

We’re not alone & what was our past:

embedded by Embedded Video

Download Video

Prof. Oberth entwarf einen Raumanzug lange bevor irgendein Mensch in den Raum vorstossen konnte:

aus Raumfahrt Enzyklopädie von Fred Appel, Aldus Books Limited, London 1971

UFOs aren’t necessarily alien spacecraft. And some purported UFOs aren’t UFOs at all.
Take this example:

or the one from Apollo 16.