The Cosmic Year in Review

hephaist0s writes "Sure, lots of things have happened this year, but all we really care about is what happened in space! The Wire and NASA both have an interesting roundup of news from space" Relatedly an anonymous reader writes "MSNBC has compiled what they think are some of the most spectacular space images of 2005 and are asking for users to vote for their favorite."

Disagree

[AsiNisiMasa]

NASA SWIFTLY SOLVES 35-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY

NASA and I have very different ideas on the meaning of the word "swiftly."

Re:Disagree

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Swift is the name of the satellite, BTW. You would have seen that by reading more then the headline.

Re:Disagree

[tedivm]

Age of universe being studied: 14,000,000,000 years Time it took them to solve mystery: 00,000,000,035 years All things being relative, thats pretty swift.

Re:Disagree

[AsiNisiMasa]

I apologize for my joke; clearly I was a fool.

Re:Disagree

[tedivm]

Its alright, it happens to the best of us- and by the best of us, I am of course refering to myself.

Re:Disagree

[Schickie]

We started off with an acronymn made into an adverb and then "punned" it. You followed with (allegedly) a po-faced response, finishing (perhaps) with a double dollop of sarcasm/irony.

Each step lost between 50 to 90-something percent of the audience.

Keep it up and you'll be talking to yourself.

Re:Disagree

[AsiNisiMasa]

I'll rest assured that you'll be following my comments accurately the whole way.

A few things

[AsiNisiMasa]

1. I think that the best thing that could happen for the exploration of space at the moment would be the discovery of some fabulously lucrative resource on a planet or in comets, meteors, asteroids, etc. Nothing serious will get done in the private sector until some significant avenue of wealth opens up. There will, of course, be long term drawbacks in having corporations rule outer space (besides Earth), but I can't imagine the ball getting rolling in any other manner in my lifetime.

2. On that note, is anyone else profoundly upset about the fact that they will never visit a lush, colonized (or otherwise inhabited) planet?

3. With all the problems that plauge space agencies worldwide, they certainly do seem to hit big when they don't miss entirely. I wonder if they purposely underestimate their mission lengths in order to pad their portfolio.

2 complaints: Flash, and no links to the images.

[UnknownSoldier]

Would help if they didn't use Flash, and actually had links to the Nasa site, so we could save them for our wallpapers, instead of clicking taking you to the next pic.

i.e.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040305.html [nasa.gov]

Re:2 complaints: Flash, and no links to the images

[Schickie]

Could it be that, (other than just cynical PR), a major purpose (in life?) of the various NASA, ESO and etc sites is to (hopefully, just maybe) get a vanishingly small percentage of the non-science general public (anti-science general public?) interested in something non-trivial? In other words, wallpaper might not percolate up that far on the priorities chart.

On the other hand, would a wallpaper "radio button" get at least one kid to want to read about black holes?

Are Astro-images difficult to root ou

Re:2 complaints: Flash, and no links to the images

[UnknownSoldier]

The wallpaper radio button is a very good idea. Simple, and effective.

You'd be surprised at wallpapers. The bigger the company, the more likely someone will have an interesting wallpaper, someone sees it, which sparks a discussion, and people get to know one another a little bit better. Who _doesn't like getting complimented?
i.e. "Hey, thats a cool wallpaper you got there! Where did you get that?"

Peace