The Treesqueak Is A Fearsome Critter That Is Said To Reside In The Forests Of North America. It Is A

Heads-up, Earthlings! The annual Geminid meteor shower has arrived, peaking overnight Dec. 13-14. It’s a good time to bundle up! Then, go outside and let the universe blow your mind!

The Geminids are active every December, when Earth passes through a massive trail of dusty debris shed by a weird, rocky object named 3200 Phaethon. The dust and grit burn up when they run into Earth’s atmosphere in a flurry of “shooting stars." 

The Geminids can be seen with the naked eye under clear, dark skies over most of the world, though the best view is from the Northern Hemisphere. Observers will see fewer Geminids in the Southern Hemisphere, where the radiant doesn’t climb very high over the horizon. Skywatching is easy. Just get away from bright lights and look up in any direction! Give your eyes time to adjust to the dark. Meteors appear all over the sky.

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After 15 years on Mars, it’s the end of the road for Opportunity

After 15 years of exploring Mars, a dust storm led to the demise of NASA’s longest-lived rover.

Opportunity has finally run out of, well, opportunities. After weeks of trying to revive the veteran Mars rover in the wake of a blinding dust storm, NASA has given up on ever hearing from it again.

After one last failed attempt to reach Opportunity February 12, NASA officials announced the end on February 13. “I was there with the team as these commands went out into the deep sky,” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a news conference at the Jet  Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “I learned this morning that we had not heard back, and our beloved Opportunity remains silent. It is therefore that I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete, and with it the Mars Exploration Rover mission as complete.”

Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 for a mission that was supposed to last 90 Martian days. Its twin rover, Spirit, had landed three weeks earlier on the other side of the planet.

Spirit succumbed to a stuck wheel in 2010 (SN: 2/27/10, p. 7). But Opportunity kept going. Over 15 years, the rover found abundant evidence that water once flowed and pooled on the Red Planet’s surface. It also shattered records for planetary exploration and shaped Mars missions for years to come.

But on June 10, 2018 — 5,111 Martian days into its 90-day mission — Opportunity went silent, caught in a massive planetwide dust storm (SN Online: 6/13/18). At first, the rover team hoped Opportunity could ride out the storm and wake up when the skies cleared. But it didn’t.

I would die for Shuri

“that’s the spirit” i say as i gesture to the spirit that’s been haunting my home for years. when will they leave or start contributing to the household by doing something like helping with laundry. when will they pay rent

me 3 days into quarantine

So an ambulance just drove by my house and it was blasting never gonna give you up and the closer it got, the more distorted the song became. What kind of alternate reality am I living in…

the solar system is probably most purely, simply fun exploratory experience humans will ever get to have, because there’s nobody there! there’s no colonialism and we don’t have to worry about aliens yet, so its just. fun!

we just land a robot on an empty planet and make it do wheelies and every few days we find like a cool rock and scientists yell about it on twitter

Iceland Adventure