It's "Cyber MARS-day!" So Forget the Shopping and Explore! Mon, Nov 26 2018 edition.

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LATE ADDITION: The Mars "Insight" probe has landed successfully on the Red Planet. For a look at what that means, and plenty of ways to connect, see daily photos from the surface of Mars, videos of many mission and design aspects, and what's ahead for planetary exploration, our pre-landing edition is still here, just below, with a wealth of clickable links.

The FOLLOWING is the edition as originally published before the landing.
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Artists are all about creativity that pushes the known limits and goes to places previously unknown. We wrote that for today. Before we learned of a particular fragment of history:

On this date in 1865 “Alice in Wonderland” was published in America. Of that anniversary, Lionel of "Lionel Media" observes, "how apropos that was and is as we slither down daily the rabbit hole: Defined as entering into a situation or beginning a journey that’s complex or chaotic."

Talk about multiple applications, down through time. The sorta thing artists love.
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All the LIVE MUSIC EVENTS this week are in a previous edition titled "Tuneful Alternatives to Mindless Consumerism" at:

https://acousticamericana.blogspot.com/2018/11/tuneful-alternatives-to-mindless.html
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THIS EDITION
IS ABOUT
TODAY'S
LANDING ON
MARS

Monday's "Cyber MARS-day" -- the InSight Mars Landing and Beyond

Today, NASA's InSight spacecraft completes its 7-month journey to Mars. It will have cruised 301,223,981 miles (484,773,006 km) reaching a top speed of 6,200 mph. __________ YOU CAN WATCH THE LANDING LIVE ONLINE NASA and JPL provide a live feed -- "live," considering it takes several minutes at the speed  of light for signals to get here from Mars -- and online coverage  runs from 11 am to 12:30 pm (Pacific). Because traffic may overwhelm the NASA site, we have  THREE OPTIONS FOR YOU TO WATCH IT: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/timeline/landing/watch-online/ https://www.livescience.com/64148-how-to-watch-mars-insight-landing.html http://time.com/5459942/insight-mars-nasa-landing/ __________ Resources to get you ready *  “NASA’s ‘Cyber Monday’ Mars Landing to Deliver Science Firsts,” the NASA / JPL  overview, gives a good look at the engineering and science involved in landing Insight and placing its instruments on Mars. *  Check out The Oatmeal’s webcomic for an explainer of how the InSight  mission will land on Mars, what it will do on the planet and what it's hoping  to find out. *  Watch these fun, one-minute videos for a quick overview of  how landing sites are chosen, how spacecraft get to Mars,  and what it takes to land there. *  Read about JPL’s “landing-site dude” and his rotating cast of interns,  who have helped select seven of NASA’s Mars landing sites – including InSight’s! Story available Nov. 26th at 6 a.m. PST on NASA/JPL Edu News. *  Read the JPL news release, “How Will We Know When InSight Touches Down?” *  LATE TODAY OR TOMORROW, you can check out InSight’s first image  from Mars, here. (This is also where you can find raw images from InSight  throughout the life of the mission.) *  Over the Next Month... *  Watch these “Mars in a Minute” videos to find out what InSight is hoping to learn on the Red Planet: “What’s Inside Mars?”  “Are There Quakes on Mars?”  and “How Did Mars Get Such Enormous Mountains?” *  Explore NASA’s Experience InSight interactive to learn about InSight’s  science instruments and how each will be deployed to the surface of Mars. *  Follow along on the InSight Mission Blog and @NASAInSight  social media over the next few weeks as NASA gets to work surveying the landing site and determining where to place each of the instruments. *  The ESA -- European Space Agency -- released THIS PHOTO Sunday as  the latest in its "Space Science Image of the Week" series. This global view  from the ESA "Mars Express" robotic probe includes the region from which  NASA’s "InSight" robotic probe will study the deep interior of the Red Planet. __________ The Mars-California Connection  The role played by Houston decades ago when humans landed on another world is most often performed now in Pasadena, California, as it directs the perilous landings of robotic probes. Only 40% of all probes from all nations that have tried to land on Mars have done it successfully. Some have missed the Red Planet and sailed into oblivion, some have crashed, and others simply never phoned home. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which leads this mission, are preparing for the spacecraft to enter the Martian atmosphere, descend with a parachute and retrorockets, and touch down around noon PST (3 p.m. EST). "InSight" -- which stands for "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport" - will be the first mission to study the deep interior of Mars. Engineers will be huddled with scientists at JPL today, watching with nervous anticipation for signals that InSight successfully touched down. Before InSight enters the Martian atmosphere, there are a few final preparations to make. Engineers still need to conduct a last trajectory correction maneuver to steer the spacecraft toward its entry point over Mars. About two hours before hitting the atmosphere, the entry, descent and landing (EDL) team might also upload some final tweaks to the algorithm that guides the spacecraft safely to the surface. These will be the last commands issued to InSight before it robotically guides itself the rest of the way. The EDL team worked for months beforehand to pre-program every stage of InSight's landing, making adjustments based on weather reports from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. "It's taken more than a decade to bring InSight from a concept to a spacecraft approaching Mars -- and even longer since I was first inspired to try to undertake this kind of mission," said Bruce Banerdt of JPL, InSight's principal investigator. "But even after landing, we'll need to be patient for the science to begin." Why We Really Need to Quit Fooling Around & Send Humans AS IMPORTANT AS THIS IS, it's not a "rover." It's not portable. Everything depends on landing in a place where the robotic probe can deploy its instruments. On top of that -- it will take two to three months for InSight's robotic arm to set the mission's instruments on the surface. By comparison, with the right training in geology and knowledge of each instrument, humans could do it in fifteen minutes. During these months required for the robot to set up the instruments, engineers will monitor the environment and photograph the terrain in front of the lander. Humans could do that every day and build a huge database useful to compare subtle changes. Instead, the highly educated and innovative humans involved in this mission must work with a single, mechanical, and rather arthritic arm, and wait many minutes to see every move it makes, perhaps thinking of Sting's lyrics for watching the stationary snail's pace of things. At JPL, the surface operations team will practice setting down the instruments one at a time using the clunky robotic arm. They'll use a working replica of InSight in an indoor "Mars sandbox," which will be sculpted to match the mission's actual landing site on Mars. The team will check to make sure the instruments can be deployed safely, even if there are rocks nearby or InSight lands at an angle. Once the final position of each instrument is decided, it will take several weeks to carefully lift each one and calibrate their measurements. Then -- if nothing serious has gone wrong in all that time -- the science can really get underway. ____________________ ____________________ That's all for this edition. We'll be back tomorrow. Stay tuneful! ____________________ <^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^> We'll be back again soon with music news and more "News of the Non-Trumpcentric Universe." (c) +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ LEGALESE, CONTACTING US, 'N SUCH... Boilerplate? Where's the main pressure gauge? And the firebox? What "boilerplate"? Who came up with that goofy term for the basic essential informational stuff... ________________________________ Direct to the Guide's current editions / MOBILE-DEVICE-FRIENDLY editions load quickly at . www.acousticamericana.blogspot.com . <^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^> . CONTACT US -- Post Comments / Send Questions / say Howdy at: Tiedtothetracks (at) Hotmail (dot) com . OR USE THE COMMENTS FUNCTION on the Blogspot site. . <^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^> Entire contents copyright © 2018, Lawrence Wines & Tied to the Tracks. All rights reserved. <^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^> . ♪ The ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE endeavors to bring you NEWS – and views of interest to artists everywhere – more specifically to musicians and the creative community and music makers and fans of acoustic and Folk-Americana music. That includes both traditional and innovative forms. From the deepest roots to today’s acoustic renaissance, that’s our beat. We provide a wealth of resources, including a HUGE catalog of acoustic-friendly venues (now undergoing a major update), and inside info on FESTIVALS and select performances in Southern California in venues from the monumentally large to the intimately small and cozy. We cover workshops, conferences, and other events for artists and folks in the music industry, and all kinds o’ things in the world of acoustic and Americana and accessible classical music. From washtub bass to musical spoons to oboe to viola to banjo to squeezebox, from Djangostyle to new-fangled-old-time string band music, from sweet Cajun fiddle to bluegrass and pre-bluegrass Appalachian mountain music to all the swamp water roots of the blues and the bright lights of where the music is headed now. . The Acoustic Americana Music Guide. Thanks for sittin' a spell. The cyber porch'll be here anytime you come back from the road. . <^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>