Just a quicklink: today the Mars Science Laboratory mission finds out whether they made all the calculations correctly as the delivery vehicle targets Gale Crater for Curiosity’s landing. Xeni at Boing Boing has put together a Curiosity rover roundup (livestream, history etc)
Image credit: nvate.com
P.S.landing should be at 15:31 AEST
Categories: education, technology
Friday Hoyden: Ada Lovelace Day 2013 
Federal election minus 1 day: last minute Coalition announcements special! 
Hoyden About Town 
Picture with the low-res camera of Curiosity’s shadow on the surface:
This tweet’s getting passed around:
Someone on RPGnet described this and the Higgs boson as humanity leveling up.
I’ve obviously got social justice on the brain.
I noticed at the press conference that the head of NASA has a darker hue of skin than the usual cultural image of an American astronaut. And indeed, Charles Bolden is the first African-American to head NASA. Go Obama!
There were a number of women in the control room, I think I counted about six, and was just starting to speculate about women in NASA having long loose hair, when it occurred to me that it was women with long loose hair I was counting – the footage made it hard to tell how many of the more androgynous humans with short hair might be women. It’s that double-bind – if we present as obviously female, we’ll get accused of bringing gender into it (“it” being NASA’s control room in this case) but if we don’t, people might not notice there are women there at all.
(for anyone who’s still teaching themselves Feminism 101 reading along at home, the assumption that of course all the short-haired humans in the room are men is just that, an assumption. And the way it’s so automatic, is what we mean when we talk about how sexism is embedded in the culture.)
Does anyone remember the Robotman strip and the occasional episodes that were a feline parody of Star Trek (featuring Vulcan/Siamese Mr Spot)? They had the starship Curiosity … first thing I thought of when I saw the landing news!
Aqua, my daughter and I were noting the number of women wearing JPL blueshirts too: we did spot a few with shorter hair.
Here’s today’s higher res pics from NASA: