Archives May 4, 2005

Wednesday, 4th May 2005.

Chip
Work == teh suck.

11:00 AM:
ESA's Mars Express orbiter has started it's 10 day RADAR antenna deployment. The antenna is used to send radar waves to the surface (and below). This will tell us wether there are reservoirs or water below the surface as well as mapping the composition of the surface and up to 5km below. This particular piece of equipment has been called "MARSIS" or Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding.


Fibreglass antenna folded up.

Underground Reservoir.


The antenna has enough stored elastic energy to un-fold it's self once released. The antenna pictured is 20m long when deployed. There are two long (20m) antennas and one 7m antenna. Images are from ESA.

3:00 PM:
Long resounding meeeeeeeh. Headache, indigestion (yummy lasagne, prolly ate too much) and tiredness makes me something, something...

5:00 PM:
Still headacheage. Boredom > Me. Fixed some theme problems with this site. Some double borders that were tables accidently nested inside eachother and also added a sub-title bar to the articles. The site looks a little more "clean cut" now.