Resonant Constellation

Here’s two unrelated, but cool things.

First, from Phil Plait’s website, LRO has gotten a picture of the Apollo 17 landing area on the moon including the flag! Here’s a link to Phil’s post with the actual pictures. This is extra cool, because I have a friend who is a grad student in lunar geology who works with LRO data, and she knows a hell of a lot about the moon. Once, when a bunch of us physics/astro people had gathered around to imbibe some beer and partake of good company, we saw her skype status message was a physics problem about diffusion of gas from a thruster rocket hitting a certain object a certain distance away. We, being the huge nerds we are, immediately began working this problem out and arrived at a sensible answer, which we sent to her. Her reply? “Oh, God, please tell me you didn’t really do that, it was supposed to be a joke!” A few minutes later, our solution was sent to NASA. Keep in mind, by this point none of us was exactly 100% sober. If you hear about some moon satellite disaster, you may know who to blame…

Anyway, the other, unrelated cool thing I wanted to share was this, a periodic table table. That’s pretty neat.