Very humid today. I did a quick bit of gardening before the rain arrives this evening and am very sweaty.
While I was up a ladder trimming the ivy, a little kid came up and told me that his Dad said I was an astronaut. When I said I wasn't, he fired his water pistol at me and ran away.
Also, numerous flies entered the house during my absence outdoors and are now bothering me.
So much of the destruction in the USA is away from the spotlight at grass roots level. But the foundations of a modern society are being smashed. The National Science Foundation has just stopped awarding new grants and funding existing ones. That effectively means that work on all existing NSF grants has to stop immediately. Universities are telling researchers to stop spending on those grants right away. That's jobs and progress and opportunity just being eradicated.
These & other Rosetta OSIRIS images can be downloaded in full-resolution & dynamic range (the latter being particularly important in this case, to see inside the 185m deep Seth pit) either from the OSIRIS gallery or ESA's Planetary Science Archive:
https://rosetta-osiris.eu
https://psa.esa.int
There are doubtless other treasures still to be found in there, but just be careful not to wake any sleeping dragons 🐉😬✌️
11/
A special operations request covering the re-entry this evening of Salsa, officially satellite number 2 in the Cluster constellation.
As a final action, a series of dummy commands were uplinked to Salsa, each containing the name of one of the active mission operations team.
The spacecraft responded to each command, acknowledging receipt.
Minutes later, it was gone, burned up in a blaze of glory in Earth’s atmosphere, 24 years after launch.
I get excited whenever the carbon intensity of the UK electricity grid is below ~100g of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity.
The 2023 average was 162g gCO2/kWh
But just look at this figure - in 2009 it was regularly ~600. We ARE making big changes. Hooray!
Source: https://tinyurl.com/48dwzz33
As the UK closes in on its legally-binding 2050 emissions reduction targets, it’ll be more important than ever to understand how green our electricity is and the impact of any action we, as GB’s Electricity System Operator, take to keep electricity flowing. We’ve created a dashboard that shows, in real time, the carbon intensity of the system and our balancing actions as well as the current generation mix. It’s an exciting development, providing unprecedented transparency around and insight into our actions – and how close we’re getting to zero carbon operation.
Some lovely news to share this morning: Blue Machine has been shortlisted for the #WainwrightPrize24 for Conservation :)
Hooray for the ocean! We need more people thinking about what the blue of our blue planet really is, rather than seeing it as a mysterious void, or just where the fish live. We are all citizens of an ocean planet and it's time to learn what that really means.
More here: https://wainwrightprize.com/
Peter Coles 🏳️🌈 🏳️⚧️
Helen Czerski
Year Progress
Mark McCaughrean
Lukasz Olejnik