thoughts from a brokenSoldier

NASA’s Phoenix Lander has an Oven Full of Martian Soil

I came across the above article while I was one of my regular trips through the NASA mission sites (what can I say, I love all things space), and the picture with the article just got me.  Often, at night, I’ll go outside and just stare at the moon.  This has been a habit all of my life, and when the moon isn’t there I find myself looking at stars and wondering how many rocks like ours are floating around them.  I could go into pages trying to explain why, but Einstein said it best:

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. 

I react the exact same way during the times I find myself gawking at the moon.  I find that while I’m looking, I’m imagining the individual peaks and valleys, wondering if I’m looking anywhere near where the Apollo 11 astronauts left their footprints, and daydreaming about fulfilling my lifelong dream of seeing the Earth from so far above.

So when on the site for the Phoenix Mars Lander, I came across this photo, and it struck that nerve within me that fills me with Einstein’s ‘unbounded admiration.’ 

 

I know it may pass by some as a trivial photo of the first step of a planned mission, but to me this photo is amazing.  To me, this photo is visual confirmation that we have come all the way from Earth and managed to land safely, get everything up and running, and dig a hole on a planet that is - at its record closest approach - well over 55,000,000 kilometers away from us. I guess I still haven’t lost that childhood admiration for such things, and frankly, I hope I never do.  

While on Mars, the Phoenix lander will perform the above task countless times, placing the dirt onto a screen to sift it into one of eight ovens in its Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer instrument (TEGA).  Once the dirt has filled an oven, the TEGA will bake the soil in order to determine its chemical makeup, giving scientists a better understanding of the "volatile ingredients" within, with one of their main targets being the water content of the soil on the Red Planet.

The soil was excavated from an area of Mars that has been unofficially named "Baby Bear," a locale previously unexplored.  And it certainly didn’t take long to run into the first of what will surely prove to be many unexpected results during the lander’s exploration of our celestial neighbor.  In scooping and placing the dirt onto the screen, they found that the dirt was falling through the vibrating screen at a much slower rate than expected.  The screen, with dirt on top, was vibrated on three different days -  June 6, 8, and 9 - with only a few particles getting through to the oven.  Peter Smith, the principal investigator for the Phoenix mission, commented on the new development, displaying that enthusiastic curiosity so important to such an ambitious mission:

"There’s something very unusual about this soil, from a place on Mars we’ve never been before," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. "We’re interested in learning what sort of chemical and mineral activity has caused the particles to clump and stick together." 

Their curiosity might be temporarily satisfied when they get the results of the oven test - but surely not for long, for whatever questions are answered, it is inevitable that more that will pop up in the course of the mission.  And that is what makes the trip all the more worth it, in my eyes.  After all, you can’t learn anything without such questions.  The answers to such questions will have untold benefits, providing answers to questions concerning the origin and evolution of our own small corner of the universe.  And on a more personal note, I’m looking forward to learning those things, because they will undoubtedly provide me with countless more hours of daydreaming and wonder when staring out into the night sky.

President Bush regrets his legacy as a man who wanted war

I came across this courtesy of a link in a fellow poster’s comment over on Pharyngula, and I really had to try to keep myself from throwing something at my laptop screen.  It covers an interview W gave in which he says that he regrets the "bitter divisions over the war" and "how his country has been misunderstood." I usually laugh at the idiocy that comes out of this man’s mouth, but this one made me genuinely angry. The things he says in the article are utterly ridiculous, and show that he has not been operating in the same reality that the rest of us inhabit.  Here’s an example:

"I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric." Phrases such as "bring them on" or "dead or alive," he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

I wonder if this guy will ever get on the same page as the rest of us.  He has somehow deluded himself into thinking that it was his rhetoric that people have become divided over, as opposed to his actual actions.  He actually thinks that he is a man of peace, and what is worse, he expects us to believe him. Somebody should tell him that it is your record of action - not your record of rhetoric - that will determine your Presidential legacy.  And in that light, his legacy would remain exactly the same, even if he had used "a different tone, a different rhetoric."

And his not-so-funny ignorance didn’t stop there, by any means:  

Mr Bush is concerned that the Democratic nominee Barack Obama might open cracks in the West’s united front towards Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. 

Again, he is simply not paying attention, and has a ridiculous misconception of reality.  To him, the "West’s united front" is defined as his narrow interpretation of the situation.  Disagree with the way he wants to handle something, and you’re somehow opening cracks in our unity.  And that is beside the fact that Obama has expressed just as much apprehension (shown here, in an article well over a year old) at the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon:

Obama said global leaders must do whatever it takes to stop Iran from enriching uranium and acquiring nuclear weapons. 

But then again, W has never been one to pay attention to what others say or think, especially those who disagree with him.  He goes on to say in the interview that he thinks Hamid Karzai - who admittedly allows "dirty deals" to continue as an official policy (because he says Afghanistan lacks the power to get things done in any other way…) - is an honest man.  The idiocy just keeps piling up.

Then again, when you consider the fact that Bush lives in a world where he can claim - with a straight face, no less - to be a "man of peace," it isn’t surprising that he thinks a politician who endorses such corruption is an honest guy.

As I’m sure is painfully obvious by the look of my page, this is my first blog.  Hopefully it won’t take me long to pick up a few skills that will go toward making my page a bit more aesthetically palatable, but until then it’ll just have to look sloppy.

Just to give a little background information, I’m a 28-year old retired veteran of the Army.  As my pseudonym implies, I was wounded overseas, and this fact naturally colors many of my perceptions of the world.  I have a Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University of Mississippi, and I’m in the process now of getting myself into graduate school to study for a Ph.D. in Philosophy, after which I’ll have to make a choice as to what field I want to study for my second graduate degree.  This is all in preparation for a career in academia, hopefully teaching at the university level.  Right now I can’t decide between a degree in sociology, anthropology, or comparative religion, though right now I’m leaning more toward anthropology.  But one good thing about the fact that it takes quite a while to get a Ph.D. is that I don’t have to make up my mind about the second anytime soon.

This blog will likely be a little sporadic, as I’m not the best at keeping to a daily schedule of writing, and will deal with anything that happens to be a thorn in my mind at the time. So, welcome to my blog, and I hope something you read will cause you to think about something you hadn’t before you stumbled across my ramblings.