Year: 2018

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Uncrewed Spaceflight Voyager

Voyager 2 goes interstellar

  • November 5, 2018

Voyager 2Launched in August 1977 prior to the departure of its sister ship, Voyager 1, NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe exits the heliosphere, the region where the solar wind from Earth’s sun has more influence than the interstellar medium between stars. Unlike Voyager 1, Voyager 2’s plasma science instruments are still working, so the instrument readings indicating a dramatic change in local space are very clear to the vehicle’s ground controllers (Voyager 1’s exit from the heliosphere in 2012 had been much more ambiguous at first). At over eleven billion miles from the Earth, radio signals take more than 16.5 hours to reach or be received from Voyager 2 at the time of its entry into the interstellar medium, and it is expected to return science data through the 2020s. It will pass within two years of the star Ross 248 in 40,000 years.

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Deaths Matters of Life & Death Movies

Douglas Rain, actor, dies

  • November 11, 2018

HAL 9000Classically trained Canadian actor Douglas Rain, best known to science fiction fans as the voice of the HAL-9000 computer in 2001: a space odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, dies at the age of 90. A veteran of the Canadian stage, Mr. Rain was a founding member of the Stratford Festival, and played a variety of parts over 45 years in Stratford, Ontario, some of which led to him reprising those performances on film. It was his narration of a 1960 documentary that got the attention of 2001 director Stanley Kubrick, who hired him to provide narration, an element that was eventually jettisoned before the movie’s release. Kubrick had, in fact, initially hired American actor Martin Balsam to voice HAL, but felt that Balsam’s performance was perhaps too emotional for the ship’s computer. Mr. Rain was enlisted to replace all of HAL’s lines in ten hours of marathon recording sessions in late 1967, long after shooting had wrapped; he claimed never to have seen the final result.

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Television

Mars: We Are Not Alone

  • November 12, 2018

MarsThe seventh episode of Mars airs on the National Geographic Channel, inaugurating the show’s second season. The series is a hybrid drama/documentary about a fictional human colony on Mars in 2042, contrasted against efforts to prepare for such a mission in the present day. The series is produced by Ron Howard (Apollo 13). Esai Morales (Caprica) guest stars.

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Deaths Matters of Life & Death

Stan Lee, Marvel Comics editor, dies

  • November 12, 2018

Stan LeeMarvel Comics’ most famous editor (and arguably its most famous creator, to the chagrin of some of the artists with whom he worked), Stan Lee, dies at the age of 95, several months after announcing that his days of attending conventions and making public appearances were over. Born in 1922, he began working at Timely Publications mere months after the company’s formation, thanks to a family connection with the company’s publisher, and became interim editor of Timely’s comics output in 1941. Timely had already seen success with artist/writer Jack Kirby’s Captain America, and Lee would not really make his mark until after a three-year sabbatical during which he enlisted in the U.S. Army and turned his talents to writing material supporting the war effort. It was during the early 1960s that Lee’s real influence on the company begin to be known, collaborating with Kirby on The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, X-Men, and others, and co-creating The Amazing Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with artist Steve Ditko. Under Lee’s editorship, Marvel led a revolution in interpreting comic book superheroes as complex, multifaceted, and flawed individuals, many of which remained bankable enough properties to lead to Disney’s 2009 acquisition of the company and rapid expansion of movie and TV adaptations of numerous characters and titles.

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New Horizons Uncrewed Spaceflight

Chasing New Horizons

  • November 17, 2018

Chasing New HorizonsPicador publishes the non-fiction book Chasing New Horizons: Inside The Epic First Mission To Pluto by scientists Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, retelling the story of Dr. Stern’s lengthy involvement in a movement to send a space probe to distant Pluto, and his eventual success as the principal investigator of the 21st century New Horizons mission, the first spacecraft to go there.

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