Hey!
I can see my house!
Russia’s ELECTRO-L weather satellite has used its 121-megapixel sensors to send home the highest-resolution set of space pics yet. Even NASA admits it can't match the Russian bird for sheer mega-pixelage, which is yours to peruse thanks to an animated GIF proivded by the Russian Federal Space Agency. The original is a little …
Agree. This so-called "peace satellite" is in reality isolating the cell phone towers and Google server farms that will be targeted in Operation Red Dawn, or as the Russians would say Operatrionski Red Dawn.
People will be too busy futilely trying to pull up Wikipedia or upload photos of invading troops to organize a proper Segway-mounted resistance.
At a local venue in town (the Fleece in Bristol), they have a projector showing random videos, and posters for up coming gigs between bands. Now they've started looping various videos from out of the windows of the ISS, swhich look bloody great on a large screen, and are just the thing to pass the time waiting for the band to finish setting up.
Yes, but in order to get the Blue Marble, they had to send some guys into space with a hassleblad medium format camera, then return them - safely - to Earth and bath the film in a bunch of chemicals to get an image. This is automatic, every half an hour and doesn't involve returning anything other than radio waves back to Earth.
@Wiggers - what you're talking about is a re-make of the original Blue Marble photo, which was Apollo 9 IIRC?
MODIS (which my partner works with, incidentally) is capable of scanning the Earth once every one to two days. This does it every 30mins.
the USA won the space race, and just about everything else in the 1950s and 1960s, because of a can-do attitude. How times have changed.
Today, the West is tying itself up in ever-increasing tangles of bureaucracy and red tape run by people whose attitude is 100% can't-do. If it's not explicitly allowed in the rulebook, it can't be done, so there's no point trying and it's our job to stop you if you disagree. My feeling is that the USA's version of this is rather more agressive than the UK/EU version, but both impede progress most successfully.
I expected the can-do magic to pop up somewhere else in the world. Russia?!
@Nigel 11 - I just don't buy this "the red tape stops us", it's defeatist talk, and excuses people from bothering to try. It's all very much a la Daily Mail "Health and safety gone mad", when you actually look at what people complain about 90-odd % of the time it's either perfectly sensible or being enforced by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
This is also besides the point that the US make some (most) of the best Earth Observation satellites in use at the moment.