Space

Drupal goes to Mars

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:59:11 -0500

Drupal goes to Mars, or rather, Drupal helps us go to Mars ... eventually. NASA's Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University is doing a lot of advanced work with Drupal. They have a number of Drupal sites, each with a different purpose, but all used to share information about Mars as discovered by ASU's THEMIS camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. All of the sites have some interesting integrations with other software, including LDAP, legacy authentication systems, Java Servlet based web services, Flash, Java desktop clients, map servers or Google Earth.

Their main portal, http://themis.asu.edu, features news, images and articles about THEMIS and the Odyssey mission. Another Drupal site, http://viewer.mars.asu.edu offers a search portal for millions of images and data from eight instruments on Mars orbiters. It uses Drupal and jQuery as the interface to a Java Servlet backend database and integrates "Deep Zoom" style image viewers.

Ever wanted to help explore Mars? No problem, http://suggest.mars.asu.edu is for you. On this Drupal site you can suggest places on Mars for scientists to photograph with the THEMIS camera aboard Mars Odyssey. The site shows you where Odyssey will be orbiting in the next week, and it integrates with Google Earth's desktop application and the Google Earth browser plugin to let you zoom around mars and choose a place to suggest. After it made the suggested photographs, it will send you an e-mail with a link, where you might be the first human to see that particular spot on mars in such detail. If that makes your inner geek jump up and down, make sure to read their technical write-up. Cool stuff!

We are small and insignificant

Fri, 01 May 2009 04:47:49 -0400

If you haven't seen this visualization of space yet, you should. Click here for the large version – don't look at the thumbnail. Even though stuff like this gets posted on the internet all the time, it continues to blow my mind. So if you've seen it already, let me remind you again of how insignificant you are. ;-)

The interesting part of about this picture is that it is billions of years old. The age of the universe is more than 13 billion years, but due to the expansion of space we are observing objects that are now considerably farther away. According to this Wikipedia article, the edge of the observable universe is now located about 46.5 billion light-years away. A lot might have changed in 13 billion years.

In other words, you better believe there are aliens out there.

Or as Douglas Adams put it in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it is a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that is just peanuts to space.

NASA using Drupal

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 11:43:30 -0400

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is using Drupal for their Academy of Program / Project and Engineering Leadership website (APPEL). Sweet!