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  Lines and colors and laser beams, oh mySep 07, 2013 3:18 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:NASA's LADEE probe ("Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer") just lifted off for the Moon; when it gets there in a month or so it will be examining the Moon's incredibly thin atmosphere, or "exosphere," "so thin that the individual molecules are so few and far between that they don’t interact with each other; they never collide." It'll also be investigating a phenomenon Apollo astronauts reported, of lunar dust levitating above the Moon's surface, hypothesized to be the result of picking up a charge from solar particles.
 
I've mentioned that levitating Moon dust a time or two before so it's neat it's actually being looked into now, but the main thing that interests me so far about this mission is that it's also testing a new long-range laser, or "optical," communication system that's supposed to be capable of much higher data rates than radio communication--"download rates in the region of 600 megabits per second." Space laser communication! Cool.
 
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With people crammed in cockpits for the ending of the last episode, it's been so long since I've really drawn someone full-figure that I had to draw a detailed version of the body beneath the suit for this page first before drawing the suit over it and then erasing the body; in fact it took me about five tries and checking general references just to get the body worked out. I took a photo of it at that stage; I guess some pointy-haired boss could get the wrong impression at a quick glance, so I'll hide it here under a maybe mildly NSFW warning.
 
Drawing the suit and erasing the body beneath it got me to here:
 
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but then I realized that I'd followed the body's contours too closely, and the resulting form-fitting suit didn't really look like something Selenis just grabbed off the mining ship's rack last episode. So I reduced the tapering at the joints and so forth, which got me to
 
Image
 
and that seemed a little more believable. And of course later I was playing with colors for a long time trying to get something worked out, and, as usual, the final result only came about after a few fortunate accidents:
 
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