Rover reaches Victoria - safe driving needed.

NASA’s newest Mars orbiter has reached at the rim of the Red Planet’s massive Victoria Crater.Appearing almost as a shiny boulder, Opportunity’s and its camera-mast shadow can easily be seen in the image by NASA’s MRO.

It just another great image which is taken from a distance of 200 million miles.
Victoria Crater is large enough to fit up to five football stadiums inside and is the biggest Martian crater to be visited by NASA’s red planet rovers.

Rover - Help in Exploration
The rovers together have taken upto approximately 160,000 images of the red planet. They have been a great help in studying the planet.Opportunity has spent 21 Earth months exploring the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. The rover’s robotic twin Spirit rolled across its own Gusev Crater landing site, scaled one of the region’s Columbia Hills and clambered down the other side.

This is the deepest thing studied on this planet. Certainly, it uncovers the secrets and provides us information about the conditions and composition of rocks in the early years. Early estimates pin Victoria Crater at somewhere between 10 million and 100 million years old, but the rocks within the depression themselves are likely much older – as in a few billion years in age.

Opportunity has already found evidence that subsurface water once soaked rocks at Meridiani Planum based on studies at Eagle Crater and the larger Endurance Crater, both of which are dwarfed by Victoria’s size.A complete trip around the crater’s 1.5-mile (2.5-kilometer) rim would take up to nine months.

Very Careful Drive
The interesting and the most difficult of all is to keep the rover safe from diving into the crater. Mission controllers have to find a safe path to enter and then exist from this crater. Everything needs to be done carefully.

Opportunity is now into the 960th Martian day of a mission that was initially planned to span just 90 sols, the term for days on Mars. Now pushing more than 10 times its expected lifetime, Opportunity could fail at any moment.

Click to see Victoria Crater

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Can you play this game ?

This game is a conversation between people. However, instead of traditional statements and responses, each response must be in lyrics that come from the top of your head.Here's how it works. When you visit Mr.Keller's posting and after that the most recent comment left under it, write some lyrics that come from the top of your head in response to the previous lyrics. Also, include the artist/author with each set of lyrics and the song title (if you can).The winner will be the one who would have submitted the greatest number of entries by that time.And, for you goal oriented folks, the winner will have a song written for him/her by Mr.Keller with the lyrics posted on his blog by Midnight (MST) on January 10,2007.

The game is hosted by Mr. Keller on his blog. You can land on his blog to play this game.

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Software Solves Moon Mystery

According to an MSN news source, an Australian computer programmer has found the missing “a” from Armstrong’s famous first words from the moon in 1969, when the world heard the phrase,

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Some historians and critics have dogged Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct, “One small step for a man ...” in the version he transmitted to NASA’s Mission Control. Without the missing “a,” Armstrong essentially said, “One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.” But Armstrong intended to say it properly and he believes he did.Some high-tec sound editing computer programmer, Peter Shann Ford proved Armstrong right.

Ford said he downloaded the audio recording of Armstrong’s words from a NASA Web site and analyzed the statement with software that allows disabled people to communicate through computers using their nerve impulses.

In a graphical representation of the famous phrase, Ford said he found evidence that the missing “a” was spoken and transmitted to NASA.“I have reviewed the data and Peter Ford’s analysis of it, and I find the technology interesting and useful,” Armstrong said in a statement.

Well, this proves that Armstrong did say the "a". But the Moon Hoax is still generating questions in the minds of people.Its the most debatable topic on the net.Did we really go to moon ? This document has all the evidences , proofs and other neccessary graphics supporting the fact that we went on moon.It also contains the myths and what hoax believers say.Deep anaysis - Go through it !

Moon Documents

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Discovery

Two NASA officials who deemed a July 1 launch for the space shuttle Discovery too risky without alterations, said they would not oppose the launch schedule approved by NASA chief Michael Griffin. "At this point it's a done deal. We now go forward and we look to see if we can launch this vehicle next week," Bryan O'Connor, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's top safety official told a telephone news conference Wednesday.

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End of 20th century warmest in 400 years

Human activity has made Earth hotter now than at any point in 400 and possibly more than 1000 years, a US Congress commissioned report said Thursday.
Temperature in the northern hemiphere warmed by about one degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) during the last century, the report by the National Academy of Sciences found.
Scientists have argued that the change was sufficient to alter hurricane patterns and see Polar ice caps melt down.
"There is sufficient evidence ... to say with a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years," the academy's National Research Council report said.
The Republican-led House Science Committee commissioned the study in November after controversial findings by climatologist Michael Mann showed that the 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the 20th century.
The latest report -- while stressing that data from before 1600 is for the large part sketchy -- said Mann's conclusion that a graphic charting temperatures over the past century looked like a "hockey stick" was correct.
The academy's National Research Council said Mann's findings were "plausible," but that there was insufficient evidence to pinpoint 1998 as the hottest year.
Existing data did illustrate that temperatures were lower before the industrial revolution and that human activity was responsible for the warming, the study said.
For the northern hemisphere, reconstructions showed that warm conditions centered around the year 1000 and that a relatively cold period -- dubbed the "Little Ice Age" -- followed from 1500 to 1850.
Things started heating up again with the industrial revolution before spiking up in the past decades.
Although temperatures 1,000 years ago were warm, they do not compare with those now, the report said. "None of the reconstruction indicates that temperatures were warmer during medieval times than during the past few decades," it said.
The report called for more research into proxy data for the period prior to 1600 so that comparisons for the past two millennia could be made, and for improved global access to existing to information on which temperature studies could be conducted.
It noted that far more research existed for the northern hemisphere than for the southern hemisphere, and that this vacuum limited the reliability of data overall.

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