Saturday 13 June 2009

The Moon doesn't wear Contacts


The Hubble Space Telescope was put into orbit in 1990 and although Wikipedia won't tell you this, sources close to the stars inform me that the main mirror became distorted by gravitational pull and the telescope was in fact short sighted.

The online encyclopedia only speaks of defects in the grinding of the mirror, but the solution it seems was to give Hubble a set of spectacles, something that was achieved through a space-walk servicing mission.

Ok, they weren't exactly shaped like a pair of glasses, but you get my drift.

It was probably more like contact lenses.

My first encounter with contact lenses was on a windy street corner in Somerset when a girlfriend turned and the lens "just popped out". We never found it.

I have subsequently spent many hours on my knees searching through carpet pile, leaves and sand- usually with no success.

One evening, late and tired, Krissie put her lenses into a breakfast bowl for "safe" keeping - it might have been my idea - and awoke blindly to see our young son tucking into a hearty bowl of baby food.

Never found that one either.

Hopefully the Hubble's contacts are more secure and won't pop out one day and tumble Earthward
in a blaze of unpredictability.

My Stellar Sources also inform me that The International Space Station - up there somewhere - periodically drops a little and requires pushing back up. It is incapable of doing this itself, as it has no boosters, and thus relies on passing spacecraft to give it a gentle shove.

Trawling through Wikipedia will not confirm this, well sort of not, but claims that boosters are an option. But who are you going to believe, me or my source?

He also told me that on the edge of Toulouse there is an artificial Mars Surface where they occasionally test one of the Mars Rover's ability to navigate through rock and dust. Apparently it is made of that decorative volcanic "stone" that you can find in garden centres and place around your herbaceous border.

He may have been pulling my leg but I received separate confirmation from an independent observer and Wikipedia backs up his other assertions regarding Spirit, another Mars Rover currently stuck in dust and unable to move and at the mercy of Martian winds, somewhere on the surface of the Red Planet.

There's a lot of stuff going on out there that a lot of us don't know much about.

1 comment:

popps said...

the English say "pulling your leg"
The Spanish, i think, say "pulling your hair."
What does everyone else say?