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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Mercurian Daylight
Thursday. 1.31.08 5:52 pm
I found a little movie showing the progress of Mercury MESSENGER towards Mercury. It will finally enter Mercury's orbit in 2011.

Mercury is a strange planet. It orbits the sun once every 88 earth days, but it rotates extremely slowly. The proximity to the sun makes days on Mercury into blisteringly hot affairs (up to 700 degrees F). There is also no atmosphere to buffer the heat loss and heat gain on the planet. However, this same effect means that Mercury also loses heat very quickly, making its night side among the coldest in the Solar System (-500 F).
However, while the Earth spins much faster than we could ever travel, you could ostensibly try and walk along Mercury's limb in order to stay in perpetual twilight or dawn, right around room temperature. See: The Chronicles of Riddick, Planet Crematoria. I was doing a calculation to see how fast you'd have to walk, but it's complicated, you see. If you go here then you can see how a day would look on the surface. Since Mercury rotates so slowly, the planet's position with respect to the sun is changing faster than it is rotating. In fact, at one point in its orbit, it would look like the sun is standing still, or even going backwards! That means that depending on the time of day and the time of year, you would need to move slower or faster to stay right at the right temperature.

It's the job of NASA-type people to think about these problems with regards to sending a lander to Mercury. Is it better to try and build a rover that can withstand the ridiculous temperature changes between night and day, or it is better to build a swift and nimble rover that can navigate across the surface at whatever speed NASA wants?
Naturally, you'd have to factor in Mercury's gigantic scarps, which can be up to a kilometer (~.62mi) high and thousands of kilometers long. It might take just a bit longer to navigate those on your way around the planet. Keep in mind that a typical one-way light time (the lag between when you send a command to your rover and when it recieves it) is about 10 minutes! No chance for last minute corrective maneuvers!

You can see how building and operating a Mercurian rover would be a Herculean effort. Just getting into orbit around this tiny planet instead of crashing into the sun will be a huge accomplishment. But we haven't even talked about Venus yet!
5 Comments.


I WANNA READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
» Dilated on 2008-02-01 08:52:23

Actually, nevermind. It must be hidden got a reason
» Dilated on 2008-02-01 08:52:53

Have you heard about the "spider" on mercury? Very interesting..There's been alot of interesting things going on, on mars as well.

P.S. Chronicles of riddick was kinda awesome :P
» lyndeep on 2008-02-01 01:18:37

I've only seen parts of that movie.
But one of those parts was running away from the sunrise. And it was intense.

Pretty cool about the sun's odd movement, too.
» middaymoon on 2008-02-01 08:08:47

Well I guess that if you lived on Mercury at least you'd get a lot of exercise.
» randomjunk on 2008-02-01 08:36:17

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