Let me start with the good news, which is that Opportunity‘s solar panels were at one point even cleaner than when I last wrote about this, the dust factor reported on May 13 being 0.964, meaning that the dust still gathered on the solar panels blocked only 3.6% of sunlight from reaching them. That value has dropped back under 0.9 according to the most recent updates, but it’s still better than at any other point since these measurements started being reported, back in 2007, and I remember reading somewhere that the panels are actually cleaner than they have been since the first year, which was 2004. In fact, though the days are still short, the Martian Southern Spring Equinox falling on August 17, the rover has so much power available that mission managers need to come up with reasons to wake it up late at night in order to condition the batteries.
Unfortunately, however, flash memory problems have been particularly frequent lately, leading to a number of resets and “amnesia events” that make me worry about the mission’s future, seeing as a rover that can’t store the data obtained or even the commands received will be useless. Not that it’s in any way unexpected, since there’s a limit to the number of times each sector of flash memory can be written to and Opportunity has been operating on Mars for nearly ten and a half years while tomorrow it’ll be exactly 11 years since she was launched, but I sure hope they’ll find some way around the issue and keep going, because it’ll sure be a terribly sad day when this mission will end.
And since I mentioned terribly sad days, we’re definitely set to have them in 2017, when both Cassini and Juno are set to end their missions, the latter obviously assuming that it’ll work properly in the first place, since it’ll only reach Jupiter in 2016. Obviously, NASA won’t admit that and even chose to name the final phase of the Cassini mission the Grand Finale, but I’d quite clearly go with something along the lines of Great Failure instead, considering what it implies.
While in the near future there will be two, at the moment our presence on or around a celestial body beyond Mars is limited to a single spacecraft, and that’s Cassini. Dawn is set to reach Ceres in 2015 and end its mission at best in early 2016, while Juno, as I said above, is set to reach Jupiter later during 2016 and end its mission the following year, likely a few months after Cassini will be sent inside Saturn’s atmosphere to be destroyed. And that’s it. The only planned mission beyond Mars at this moment is JUICE, which is set to launch in 2022 and reach Jupiter in 2030, so for many years we will have absolutely no presence whatsoever on or around any celestial body outside the inner solar system.
But wait, it gets even worse! The Voyagers are also set to run out of power at some point during the 2020s, while New Horizons may shut down even before that time, as current efforts are aimed at finding another target it can reach no more than four years after its 2015 flyby of Pluto. What this means is that there will probably be a period during the 2020s when we’ll have absolutely nothing left beyond Mars. Ever since the early 1970s, when Pioneer 10 reached first the asteroid belt and then Jupiter, we’ve had a continuous presence outside the inner solar system, yet some 50 years later that will probably cease to be the case!
In 1969 we could put people on the Moon! In 1977 we could launch the Voyagers, which are still operational and exploring the outer boundaries of the solar system, a few of their instruments even being better than those on New Horizons, which was launched in 2006! Then in 1997 we could launch Cassini, which is now set to end its mission around Saturn 20 years later! Yet in the late 2010s and early 2020s we won’t even be getting past Mars anymore!
We sure stopped dreaming, haven’t we? I mean, what the fuck happened to us? Isn’t science and technology supposed to advance? Weren’t we supposed to be in the space age? Why are we moving back instead of forward? Why do we keep looking down towards our feet instead of up towards the sky? And if we are to look down, why don’t we go up first, to gain a new perspective as we’ll look down at our beautiful, fragile world?
This does remind me of another Babylon 5 quote: “When you stumble a lot, you… You start looking at your feet. We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying ‘Make my life have meaning.’ And to our inheritors before us saying ‘Create the world we will live in.’ I mean, we’re not just holding jobs and having dinner. We are in the process of building the future.”
Too many people forget that. Too many care only about their pockets, stomach and groin, and at most those of a few loved ones as well. Too many focus only on the here and now, on immediate problems and instant gratification. Too many are only concerned with quick gains and practical results. Too many stumble merely because they refuse to open their eyes and lift their heads enough to see the cracks, hurdles, twists and turns ahead… And too many who would look and go farther are brought down by them as they writhe and crawl through the mud and dirt.
Well, I for one will keep looking up, here on Earth as well as to the stars, both literally and figuratively, and can only hope that, against all odds, enough others will eventually do the same. Merely looking and hoping and aiming won’t be enough on its own, but it’s necessary if we’re to have a chance to create a future worth living in, for ourselves and for the other species we share this pale blue dot with… And who knows, perhaps for others we will someday meet out there as well.
In my previous personal post, I was saying I was waiting on NASA to post another update about Opportunity, because I wanted to write another brief post about the little rover as soon as that happened, yet they did that a few days ago and, though the excuse’s gone, the post’s still not here and it’ll continue not being here at least until Sunday. I’m hoping to write it then, however, especially since I now mean to launch into a rant about the future of space exploration as well and I wrote most of that already, albeit in a form that will require some changes before being posted.
That said, this post is obviously only here so I’ll have something written this week, in order for the one I hope to add Sunday to be the second. Seeing as I barely manage to struggle to add a paragraph of crap per day in my story and I still haven’t gone over the last two chapters, this seems fair enough, since if I could write any more I should probably do it there instead of here… Not that I’m too sure why I keep struggling with any of it, seeing as I obviously can’t do anything and trying only makes it worse.
Not playing anymore either, apparently, after entering a chaos spiral that ended with being repeatedly attacked by the chaos monster. Can’t seem to win against that thing, so didn’t even try anymore and was thinking of starting over, especially since I learned some more things that should make things better this time around, but obviously didn’t do that either and don’t particularly care to at this point… Just like I don’t care to keep trying to write a description for a game I remembered playing many years ago and which I meant to submit on MobyGames, after staring at the screen and not managing to put as much as one word in on a few different occasions.
Since it’s Sunday and I’m still waiting for another update about Opportunity to be posted, I guess I could mention that tomorrow Cassini will celebrate ten years of exploring Saturn and its system of moons and rings. During this time, it returned a huge amount of useful data and generated thousands of scientific reports, and it can be said to be more or less responsible for much of what we know about the Saturn system in general, and for most of our current understanding of Titan in particular.
It also appears that the name for what will unfortunately be the final phase of the mission, starting in late 2016 and ending the following year with the spacecraft being sent into the gas giant to be destroyed, should also be announced these days. Doubt the choice will be suitable, however, seeing as the moment will mark the end of our presence on or around any planet beyond Jupiter, and also be near enough to the end of our presence on or around any celestial body beyond Mars, with the Juno mission also set to end in 2017 and Dawn possibly as early as late 2015. Sure, we’ll still have the Voyagers, and New Horizons may continue to operate as well, but those will be speeding through the vastness of space…
While I’m at anniversaries, however, I’ll also mention the fact that Curiosity has completed the first Martian year since landing on the red planet this Tuesday. I can still honestly say I don’t exactly care about that thing, due to the fact that it uses nuclear power when Opportunity has proven solar panels to be sufficient on the surface of Mars and Juno is set to do the same while operating in orbit around Jupiter, but I guess that’s no reason not to mark the moment at least.
That’s a strange post title, ain’t it? But the thing is that I keep meaning to write another brief post about Opportunity right after an update will be posted, I somehow forgot to check for several days earlier this month, during which the one covering June 4 to 11 showed up, and since then I keep waiting for the next one and it doesn’t seem to be coming. If each update usually covers about a week, there should have been two more by now, but instead there is none.
That said, and seeing as I definitely don’t feel like struggling to post anything else either, I’ll just make use of this day with no matches to say that I did manage to get back to King of Dragon Pass well enough, so at least I’m still playing something, if little else. And not only that, but I also stumbled upon Akinator these days, apparently “only” several years late, and I currently mean to use it for at least 100 characters before I’ll rate it and consider it a game played. Had to add five out of the 40 characters I already tried, by the way, including one I definitely didn’t expect to be unknown to it, and it completely failed on two others, while on yet another I didn’t care to continue after two wrong guesses, but at the same time there are moments when it homes in shockingly quickly and there were even characters I picked thinking they’ll be difficult to guess that it identified on first try.
Otherwise, I’m close to finishing another chapter in my story, but I still can’t exactly count it or the last one, seeing as I can’t bring myself to even read them again, knowing they’re nothing but crap added only to be able to say I kept writing something. Also, as far as the blog is concerned, you may have noticed that I didn’t post anything about protests or related activities and events since the start of the month, which is in part because I doubt I’ll manage at the moment and in part because I’m not sure I care to even try anymore.
And now I’ve been sitting here for a while, wondering whether I should add anything else to this post and, if so, what. There are rants I could launch myself into, and have launched into over the past few days while exchanging messages with the few people who may still be talking to me, but not sure there’d be any point in adding any of that here as well and, even if there may be a point, I doubt I care to try. Let’s just say that I updated my idea of a dream home to a house built in a clearing deep inside a forest and surrounded by a high wall with no gate, the only access being through a tunnel that’d obviously also be used for all the necessary pipes and cables, which tunnel would have a solid locked gate at the other end and be permanently monitored by cameras and other security systems.
While I’m scheduling everything around World Cup matches these days, I also seem to manage to play Return to Krondor a fair amount. I don’t seem to be doing much before the first match of the day, but then I squeeze as much play time as I can, also putting in about an hour after the last match as well. That means writing’s going particularly poorly once again, as it gets relegated to the last hour before going to bed, but I haven’t been able to get anything that’s not pointless crap out in a long time and still haven’t gone over any of it, so at least I spend less time pointlessly struggling and getting frustrated.
Seeing as I just got to chapter seven last night and the game apparently has ten, I should be finishing it relatively soon if I keep this up, which means I may even get to five games finished this year, since this would be the third. Won’t be writing a review for it either, since I have nothing to add to the excellent one Oleg posted on MobyGames only a couple of months ago, so I may even try to carry some momentum into whatever I’ll decide to play next, assuming I’ll get to that point without getting back to my usual state of not feeling up for anything at all as long as certain impossible things don’t happen… Or as long as I don’t wake up to realize that all these years have been nothing more than a bad dream.
Otherwise, as the post’s title states, my body’s still quite unhappy and making sure I’m aware of it. A couple of things are better, but I’m noticing a couple of new issues as well, so these things don’t seem to care to go away on their own and at least some of them I quite clearly won’t be able to sort out on my own. I’m still trying to ignore what that means at the moment, and there have been times in the past when that somehow seemed to work, at least for a while, so we’ll see what happens.
At least today’s the Summer Solstice, so the days will start getting shorter. There’s a time, around the Winter Solstice, when it gets dark slightly too early even for me, but for most of the year the sunset comes far too late as far as I’m concerned, and around this time of year the sunrise is too early as well, around the time when I normally go to bed, so I keep wishing for darker days. Then again, lately it’s been cloudy and also rained a fair amount, so this month was mostly manageable, but I dread what the rest of the summer will bring, considering the forecasts I’ve heard.
But this was only meant to be a short post, pretty much only written so I’ll have a second one here this week, so I’ll stop here now that I got that out of the way while also avoiding the need for a second Sunday update this year. It’d have been hard to write anything tomorrow anyway, seeing as there’s the race as well and I’ll also need to go for a short walk, since I didn’t go outside at all this week.
