I heard this interstitial while listening to “Car Talk” today:
“As soon as you wake up, you need the latest.”
Do I really? This seems presumptuous.
“And that is why ‘Up First’ is here. It is NPR’s morning news podcast.”
Yikes. That sounds like a stressful way to spend the first minutes of consciousness.
“In just ten minutes, you can start your day informed.”
Yeah…no. In just ten minutes, I can start making my second Americano.
The trailer for “Apollo 11” is out, and the reviews for its premiere last week at Sundance are quite enthusiastic, so there’s a chance of it having more than the very limited theatrical release Sundance-selected documentaries usually get. Here’s hoping.
“It’s one thing to boast about the specs of these images, and quite another to see the spruced up footage for yourself. It’s rare that picture quality can inspire a physical reaction, but the opening moments of ‘Apollo 11,’ in which a NASA camera crew roams around the base of the rocket and spies on some of the people who’ve come to gawk at it from a beach across the water, are vivid enough to melt away the screen that stands between them. The clarity takes your breath away, and it does so in the blink of an eye; your body will react to it before your brain has time to process why, after a lifetime of casual interest, you’re suddenly overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.”
– David Ehrlich, Indiewire
I was glad to see that, at least in the trailer, they used none of the footage previously seen in the 1972 “Moonwalk One” documentary.
“There was one guy, his name was Urs Furrer, and he was a well-known cameraman. He was a big guy – his name means ‘bear’ and he was big like a bear. I’d look for him because I knew that he could put this camera on his shoulder. I don’t know how much it weighed with a thousand feet of film on it; it was a ton. But he could use it like a handheld camera.”
– Theo Kamecke, director of “Moonwalk One”
Here’s some beautiful descent footage from the Chang’e-4 spacecraft that made the first ever soft landing on the far side of the moon last week. When it rotated quickly toward the surface at 1:01, I found myself instinctively saying with a grin, “Pitchover!” I’d suggest viewing this full-screen.
July 2020 edit: The original video went missing, so I’ve replaced it with this Planetary Society copy.
Here’s the descent profile you’re seeing in that video:
Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Centre
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team have determined where Chang’e-4 touched down, its approximate position in the Von Kármán crater shown in the older LRO imagery of the area below. LRO will next pass over the Chang’e-4 site toward the end of this month, when they ought to be able to snap a picture of the lander on the surface. Depending on LRO’s altitude at the time, it will show up as anything from a few bright pixels – remember that it’s just the far side and not a dark side – to something showing a bit more detail of the lander, the rover, and perhaps its tracks.
NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
First full panorama released of the landing site, produced from 80 images:
“Yeah, sure, high-def landing video, but does it bounce? I thought not.” – Surveyor 3
Okay, so the descent engine didn’t cut off at the right altitude, but that new one still can’t bounce.