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| Mary Worth, Mars Rover Pieces, Nobel Prize | Oct 10, 2012 4:59 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Jeepies, inking today's page went smoother than anything else I've ever tried to ink, I think. Why, if I could stay in this zone consistently, I could...draw more stuff! (EDIT: Spoke too soon! She was cross-eyed and it took me two tries to sorta straighten her right eyeball out. :P)
It does remind me of like a sorta generic Mary Worth newspaper strip style, but eh...hm. Well, it probably won't last.
Here are the pencils before I starting putting ink on them--I took a photo because they came out fairly nice and I wanted to preserve them before probably ruining them with ink:
Notice I'd been thinking I'd do more shading of the face! But when you're just black and white--rather than ink washy like I've done up until the past few days--you gotta be a little more discriminating on what you do and do not shade, so I thought I'd err on the lighter side for the face today, for a change.
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More space debris news! But this is a big-un! A European Space Agency satellite that unexpectedly shut off in April could doom us all--well, okay, anyway it poses "an unusually large danger to a heavily populated corridor in polar orbit at 780 kilometers in altitude." That's because the ESA operators of the 26-meter, 8000 kg Envisat satellite didn't follow international guidelines, which say that you're not supposed to cruise your satellite around once it reaches the point where it has just enough fuel to move to a lower orbit; instead, they continued to operate it at its high orbit past that fuel point, meaning that it could no longer move to a lower orbit which would then decay and burn it up more or less safely in the atmosphere. And then its unexpected shutoff made things even worse, because it meant they couldn't "passivate" it, ie get rid of fuel remnants, live batteries, and other power sources that could cause additional damage. Now legal beagles are arguing over whether or not the ESA could be held liable if Envisat, which went into space in 2002, damages another craft during the 100-some years it will be drifting through that rather crowded space lane; this could potentially develop into the first case of legal space negligence!
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Analysts and operators of the Curiosity rover on Mars just figured out that a mysterious "bright object" seen in the Martian soil next to the rover as it scooped up a soil sample on Sunday is a piece of the rover itself--exactly what piece and how it fell off remains a mystery. You can see it here as a little irregular silver thing in the dirt near the bottom center:
image by NASA (source)
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The Nobel Prize in physics just went to an American and a French scientist, who both specialize and quantum optics, and separately developed methods to measure and control isolated quantum particles. For instance, the American scientist, David Wineland, was able to prove experimentally the theory that quantum particles can be in two places at once--something which had been thought unprovable, but he found a way "to hit an atom with laser light, which according to quantum theory had a 50 percent chance of moving it, and observe the atom at two different locations, 80 billionths of a meter apart."
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