Category: Space

lost in space on animal crossing

whbeebe

My youngest daughter found an extra Animal Crossing DIY recipe for a lunar rover and gifted it to me in-game. The recipe calls for ten star fragments, ten iron rocks, and four old tires. The old tires have to be found randomly while fishing, and they take a while to collect. But collect them I finally did, and so here we are, my avatar with his lunar rover in front and satellite in back.

The lunar rover is part of the Animal Cross Space Theme (  https://nookipedia.com/wiki/Space_Theme ). So far it looks like I have three in the Space Theme: the satellite in back, the lunar rover in front, and the flying saucer on the back part of my island. I don’t know how many more are left to collect, or when the recipes will show up. But having just these two together is a bit of fun.

james webb space telescope

whbeebe
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) trajectory trace from launch to final orbit (via NASA)

In a world awash in bad news (climate warming, the Ukraine, Omicron, insurrection, etc, etc, etc) it’s nice to read some very good news. Such is the case of the JWST reaching its stable orbit around Earth’s Lagrange 2, or L2 point. I’ve been following the progress of JWST from its launch on the Ariane 5 through each step of its deployment and final orbital injection burn. It was a $10 billion dollar gamble, but an incredibly engineered gamble, and it all paid off by paying attention to the most minute engineering and science detail. All the naysayers kept saying how it was a waste of resources, that there were too many things that could, and would, go wrong. But as the time passed through its construction and testing, the launch, and each little deployment step, all the criticisms were slowly and methodically knocked down.

Now the JWST is in orbit around L2, its science packages and instrumentation continuing to cool down towards near absolute zero for the telescope’s sensor. There will still be tiny, tiny, tweaks to be made to each of the mirror’s subsections, a final tuning, but that also appears to be going well.

I’m amazed at what’s been accomplished, and so thankful that NASA shared the voyage out to L2 with us. JWST goes to reassert what we can accomplish if we just decide to do it and then do it right.