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This past week saw two new articles posted to the website:
- Extremis Phase 2 Plotting – an overview of the trajectories chosen to undergo more intensive trajectory analysis over the next 2-3 months
- Space Radiation Data Analysis – an in-depth look at what scientists can determine based on the limited radiation data collected so far
The astronauts have all departed on a Badlands excursion to test their survival training skills. Pretty much the worst case scenario would be to have a capsule making an off-target landing to this area of Kerbin and forcing recovery crews to search for it. They will have to last two days and nights with just the minimal supplies that would fit into a capsule (yes, we have some early design specs to base this off of). They will be located nearby each other for the sake of easy rescue should the training exercise go awry but not close enough they can rely on each other for support.
Tomorrow a rally is being held in Sheltered Rock, the current government seat, in protest of the shut down action handed down to us at KSC by the judiciary. Many KSA staff, family and friends are expected to attend along with members of the public. We have our court hearing scheduled for next Thursday, hoping the case will simply be tossed out.
ATN Database
The weekly update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 1,628 asteroids and 5 updated with new observation data.
Celestial Snapshot of the Week
The Kerman Observatory atop Kravass scoped in on Jool and Duna as they made their closest approach to each other for our current orbit around Kerbol. Doing so they caught something by accident that until now had not been seen in any previous photos of Jool’s moons (or any other planet) – one of them entering the planet’s shadow. Here we see Laythe starting to disappear as half of it enters the shadow of Jool.
From the Desk of Drew Kerman
Out of Character Behind the Scenes stuffWritten on 2/28/17
Yea I’ve been slacking a lot, finishing up my Olympics replay viewing and screwing around on GTA: Online, although this past weekend I put in some serious time to get over $1M so I could afford this sweet vehicle and all the customization and performance upgrades to it. I have a 370Z in real life and would love to own a 240Z as well for my classic car someday.
I still have no idea what the hell is going on with my servers, the page that includes the WordPress headers refuses to work still and no one appears to know why. Okay. Also it seems the orbital GeoGebra figure was failing to load because someone renamed the MIME type and the support people claim none of them would have reason to ever do that. So I got hacked? Ugh. No idea but as far as the general public is concerned the site functions fine now, so that’s something at least.
The plan remains to push out to a 3-week lead and then start ramping back up to full-scale ops, so it all depends on how fast I can do that, but I’m putting all effort and focus into it now.
Also I happened to watch a video on Earth’s magnetic field over on the Curious Droid channel just after writing up the radiation article, which helped me go back and rewrite it better. Great timing, that!
