Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

I work with Erik, who has been getting some press recently for creating some signs for his yard. Odd how this stuff happens. The reclassification of Pluto got me to thinking about the past. I had worked with David Levy on a software project many years ago based on his book Skywatching. Levy had a personal relationship with the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh.

I hadn’t thought about all this in quite a while. It is odd how seemingly random events can cause you to remember things that had been forgotten.

According to this article at Space.com, scientists have evidence of a prediction based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This prediction was developed in 1918 and called “frame dragging”. To confirm the prediction the researches bounce lasers of two satellites LAGEOS and LAGEOS 2. Pretty nifty eh?

In a little more than 15 days, the Genesis mission will end with a finish like an action film: a capsule will be caught in a helicopter mounted net as it returns to earth. The mission began in 1998 and was designed to study solar winds and collect the particles present in solar wind. Check out the official press release here: NASA Mission Returns with a Piece of the Sun

According to this article, Opportunity Rover Finds Strong Evidence Meridiani Planum Was Wet , NASA scientists believe they have found evidence that water once occupied the area the Opportunity Rover is now driving around in. This is pretty exciting. I must say that I find looking at the mars rover pictures on a daily basis a fun bit of exploration.

I was wondering what OS was running on the Mars Rovers. I did a little bit of searching and came up with this article at Computerworld.

In a nutshell, they are running VxWorks. They have a 20 Mhz Power PC processor, and 128 MB of RAM.