m. c. de marco

(Click twice to embiggen.)

Via Angel Station: One Giant Leap to Nowhere, a depressing New York Times editorial by Tom Wolfe about the unexpected premature end of the space age forty years ago.

SFScope has links about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, along with a mock-interview with Michael Collins.

Usually, you find yourself either too young or too old to do what you really want, but consider: Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, Buzz Aldrin 1930, and Mike Collins 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. We survived hazardous careers and we were successful in them. But in my own case at least, it was 10 percent shrewd planning and 90 percent blind luck.

Via a mailing list: Universe Today reports on a newly-discovered Earth-like planet and its possibly watery companion.

Planet Gliese 581 e orbits its host star – located only 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra (“the Scales”) — in just 3.15 days.

“With only 1.9 Earth-masses, it is the least massive exoplanet ever detected and is, very likely, a rocky planet,” says co-author Xavier Bonfils from Grenoble Observatory.

Science@NASA reports on the search of L4 and L5 for remnants of the hypothetical proto-planet Theia which may have crashed into Earth to form the Moon:

Debris from the collision, a mixture of material from both bodies, spun out into Earth orbit and coalesced into the Moon.

Today’s Google logo leads to a page about Giovanni Schiaparelli, the astronomer who saw canals on Mars, along with a video about exploring Mars through Google Earth.

I posted this to a mailing list yesterday, but then forgot to blog it last night. Via Futurismic: the physics arXiv blog reports on a possible solution to Fermi’s Paradox.