Image description: Erin Wilson, a NASA engineer, adds aluminum tape to electrical cables to protect them from the cold during environmental testing of special optical equipment. These tests will verify the alignment of flight instruments that will fly aboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Photo by Chris Gunn, NASA
Image description: The Archivist of the United States recently posted this story about patents that you may not know:
You may think that the National Archives is an unlikely place to learn the secrets of Michael Jackson’s dance moves — but you’re wrong!
Within Record Group 241, Records of the Patent and Trademark Office, patent 5,255,452 gives us the secrets behind one move in particular — Michael’s “lean” as done in the music video, “Smooth Criminal.”
Image description: Mel Parsons from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dives at the Tippo Bayou sampling station in the Mississippi Delta near Philipp, MS.
In what looks like pea soup, the diver was helping to collect ‘Sediment Oxygen Demand’ information. Sediment oxygen demand refers to how much oxygen is being used by organisms and plants in the sediment. The EPA uses these measurements to better understand the overall health of the water.
Photo from the EPA
A Flight Through the Universe
Video description
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) has released the largest-ever three-dimensional map of massive galaxies and distant black holes, which will help astronomers explain the mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy” that scientists know makes up 96 percent of the Universe.
This video is a fly-through of the SDSS-III galaxies mapped in the latest data release.
Video courtesy of Miguel A. Aragón (Johns Hopkins University), Mark SubbaRao (Adler Planetarium), Alex Szalay (Johns Hopkins University), Yushu Yao (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC), and the SDSS-III Collaboration
Image description: This is one of the first images taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT). It was taken through a “fisheye” wide-angle lens. As planned, the rover’s early images are lower resolution. Larger color images from other cameras are expected later in the week.