NASA dumbing down?
Why does it have an IMAX camera on board, and why is it sending half a million mp3s per day back to its ground station?
Sounds rather silly, not to mention staring at the sun is bad for you.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) blasted off today at 15:23 GMT from Cape Canaveral following an aborted launch yesterday due to unfavourable wind conditions. The SDO launch. Pic: NASA SDO was carried aloft by an Atlas V rocket (see pic) en route to its final inclined geosynchronous orbit at around 36,000 km from Earth …
Me and my family saw the launch (on the 2nd attempt) from the Saturn V museum on the Kennedy Space Center. There were plenty of people there (albeit somewhat less than for the aborted launch the day before) and it was damn cold. It was, however, sunny - and not very cloudy. We could see the concentric sound waves shimmering in the clear blue sky before the rocket hit the cloud level.