Not sure which one is my favorite- I love the Cassini picture of Saturn, the “painting the eclipse” one, and the one of the ISS and the Shuttle silhouetted in front of the Sun.
I like the one of the Shuttle, the ISS, and the Sun.
I like them all but this one shows that NASA needs to get out of the car making business and turn it all over to the pros. Going point 2 MPH or less and lasting longer than 90 days just don’t sound that great compared to other off-road vehicles. The good folks at the Discovery Channel Monster Garage. build superior alternatives all the time and that is for just one show. It could pay for itself by letting space and racing fans pilot it remotely via the internet using their own computer their own joystick. $100 for ten minutes sounds steep until you realize that the gravity is much weaker on Mars thus allowing incredible jumps. That is similar to the time-sharing NASA used to set up for the Hubble telescope except a whole lot more useful and fun. NASA can still use it sometimes of course but they probably don’t need it much because there is only so much you can do with really cold piles of dirt and some potholes.
I’m actually having trouble convincing myself that that picture of Saturn is real. It looks like a painting.
Beautiful! Thank you. I was space trucking in the Tarantula Nebula for a little while there. Thanks again.
I’m a big fan of this guy’s images. I have prints of this picture and this one, plus an awesome picture of the Shoemaker-Levy comet fragments hitting Jupiter (which doesn’t seem to be be on his site), and a print that contains five of his most colorful aurora pictures.
Shagnasty: Contests aren’t a bad idea, but you do realize that the Mars rovers had to work in a vacuum at VERY cold temperatures, only solar power, and with too long of a delay to operate real time, right? (not to mention size and weight limits of the launching rocket)
Brian
Just a couple of weeks ago, we were debating whether sending a colony of humans on a city-sized space-craft on a multi-thousand year mission to the nearest star was feasible and a surprising number people argued yes. I tried to slip the ultimate remote controlled car into the mix and I get called on it.
Don’t underestimate the mods the guys a the Monster Garage can come up with. That isn’t the point though. I am aware that the time-delay with introduce some significant control complexities. That is why, unlike the moon missions, the remote-controlled rover really will be fake. It will be just a really expensive on-line video game that funds the real thing. Who is going to know? People claim stuff is fake anyway so people are used to the accusation.
The page with the last one, the Saturn photo, won’t load for me. This, of course, makes me about ten times as desperate to see it in large format.
One of the commenters touched it up and resized it to 1280x1024, it looks pretty good. Get it here:
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/crd34/saturndesktop.jpg
Thanks for the new desktop wallpaper!