Astronauts on Earth; ‘Face’ on Mars

7:25 AM

Wheels Stop Glad that’s over.  I’ve been up since 3AM; spent the shuttle landing sitting in front of a camera just in case things went terribly wrong.  Happily, they didn’t; we did a bulletin that lasted perhaps five minutes. Astronauts, by and large, find that earth takes some getting used to when they come home.  Some of them just feel heavy; others, having suffered from motion sickness as they got used to weightlessness at the beginning of the flight, feel it again as their inner ears adapt to the novel feeling of gravity. "I found it hard to look up at anything for a while," said former astronaut John Herrington, who provided us with some background during the last shuttle flight.  "And you know that prickly feeling you have if you’ve been sitting in a chair too long and your leg goes to sleep?  I felt that through my entire lower body." Herrington, who flew on STS-113 in 2002 (the last successful flight before the Columbia disaster), has left NASA but not space.  He now works for Rocketplane Limited, Inc., one of about a dozen startup firms hoping to fly in space, without government help, for profit.  ================= The "Face" on Mars I ought to know better, but I couldn’t resist.  Remember the famous "face" on Mars–the grainy image from Viking 1 in 1976 that may have been the best thing ever to happen to conspiracy theories? Well, now the European Space Agency has offered a new image from its Mars Express probe, which has been orbiting Mars for two years. I wouldn’t dare to offer an interpretation, but the ESA does: "These images of the Cydonia region on Mars are truly spectacular," said Dr Agustin Chicarro, ESA Mars Express Project Scientist. “They not only provide a completely fresh and detailed view of an area so famous to fans of space myths all around the world, but also provide an impressive close-up over an area of great interest for planetary geologists, and show once more  the high capability of the Mars Express camera.”  (More HERE.) Whaddya think?