 | |
| |
|
|
| |
| Wacky experiments, shady deals, and Apollo 15 | Sep 06, 2012 7:38 AM PDT | url |
| | |
Added 1 new A* page:I borrowed the name "Hadley" from the name of the lunar landing site for Apollo 15. It appears to have been an interesting mission!
image by NASA/David Scott (source)
The crew, for instance, got up to not just one but *two* unauthorized deals. For one, a German stamp dealer paid each of the three astronauts a tidy sum for agreeing to have one of the crew carry "unauthorized commemorative postal covers" inside his space suit, in addition to the officially NASA-authorized ones for the U.S. Postal Service. For the other, one of the astronauts "told mission control he was doing some clean up activities around the rover so they wouldn't know what he was doing" while he planted an unauthorized plaque--made by a Belgian sculptor who later tried to sell replicas (although the "deal" he'd made with the astronauts had said he wouldn't)--on the lunar surface, bearing the names of 14 dead American and Soviet astronauts and cosmonauts:
image by NASA (source)
The ~3" figure in front of the plaque is known as the "Fallen Astronaut," and was meant to represent the deceased spacemen.
Another surprise event surprised even the crew, when during their first sleep period after the lander reached the Moon, Houston Mission Control detected a slow, steady oxygen leak--turned out to be "an open valve on the urine transfer device."
Also, they conducted an experiment to show that Galileo was correct: two objects should fall at the same speed regardless of their mass. The Moon, not having an atmosphere to provide air resistance, is a pretty good place to test that, so one astronaut dropped a hammer from one hand and a feather from the other at the same time, and wouldn't you know it, they hit the ground at the same time as well! You can watch the video of that here. (I wonder if he did a test run first juuuust to make sure there were no surprises. ;)
~~~~~~~~~~
Only one page again today; I've somehow found myself in the middle of three separate art supply experiments. Dug out the ol' small sable brush as part of one, to do the smallish figure in today's page--the big synthetic/horsehair brush I've been using for most of this episode is fun, but sometimes I do get a bit frustrated when trying to do detail with it. Here's another thing related to these experiments:
I'll be pretty surprised if anyone can guess what that is! ... Uh. It actually looks worse than it is.
First thing tomorrow, I'll probably be destroying an old sable brush in an experiment involving a caulking gun. ... Yeahhh I'd say the brush has a low chance of survival. :p
~~~~~~
Ohh yeah and I came across a webcomic with very nice sketchy art, called Shiver Bureau. Looks like another superhero comic book pro has crossed over into webcomics--I expect just about all of 'em'll do that at some point, just you wait.
|
·····
|
|
|
