Planetary
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NASA panel says Curiosity needs to drive less and drill more
NASA is not getting its money's worth of Curiosity, according to a review panel looking at seven planetary missions. The senior scientists criticized the nuclear-powered Mars rover, saying it needed to take more than the eight drill samples scheduled for the rest of its mission. It added that Curiosity has done too much driving (which has severely damaged the wheels) and peripheral activities like searching for clouds. As a result, it rated the rover lowest of the seven missions reviewed, despite the fact that it cost the most. Meanwhile, the Jupiter Cassini mission, which has produced a spectacular cache of images and scientific data, received the highest rating and will be extended at least three years. Despite the ranking, Curiosity was still graded "very good" and all seven missions will retain their funding. That includes the indefatigable Opportunity rover, still trucking after a decade.
Smithsonian adds iPad app code to its collection
The Smithsonian Institution's 19 museums hold millions of items, and now the collection includes iPad app source code. The Cooper-Hewitt design museum in New York is one of those many Smithsonian "attics" that stash away the world's treasures, and it recently acquired the source code to an iPad app called Planetary (free). The app is a music visualizer that was written by Bloom Studio, a company that's no longer in business. The Cooper-Hewitt has open-sourced the code on Github, and the museum has committed to not only boost the development of any outgrowth from the open-source project, but to also preserve those descendants of Planetary as well. In case you're wondering, the museum requires a physical paper record, so the source code has been printed on archival paper in the machine-readable OCR-A font.
James Cameron-backed Planetary Resources to search the universe for Unobtainium
Planetary Resources will reportedly announce later today that it's developing and selling low-cost spacecraft to mine asteroids close to the Earth. The space exploration and natural resources venture is led by X-Prize creator Peter Diamandis, Eric Anderson and NASA's former Mars chief, Chris Lewicki -- with cash backing from James Cameron, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page amongst others. Within a decade, the company hopes to kickstart a 21st century gold rush by selling orbiting observation platforms to prospectors with significant rewards -- a 30-meter long asteroid could hold as much as $50 billion worth of platinum at today's prices. The company's own teaser materials promised that the project would add "trillions of dollars" to the world's GDP, which sounds like a film we saw recently.
App review: Planetary for iPad
The iPad's music player hasn't changed much since its debut, and unlike its desktop counterpart, it also lacks a built-in music visualizer for your mesmerization. Luckily, for the folks who are seeking ways to spice up their iPad music experience, you now have a new option: Planetary, by Bloom Studio. As you can tell by the name and the screenshot above, what we have here is a visually compelling app for exploring your tablet's music library. It's very straightforward: each artist or band is shown as a star, surrounded by albums in the form of orbiting planets, and then you have individual tracks displayed as moons orbiting each album. During playback, each track leaves behind a trail on its orbit to indicate its play time, though you can hide the orbit lines (and labels) if you them too distracting. To choose other albums or artists, the good old pinch-to-zoom or the simple tapping on other 3D objects will move you between the moons and constellations, or you can just tap on the bottom-center button to jump straight to the letter selector for artists. Obviously, the former's more fun within the first few hours, but after awhile we found ourselves preferring the quicker option to skip the mellow animation. Head past the break for our full impression and demo video. %Gallery-122989%
Incredible music visualizer Planetary brings a galaxy of music to your iPad
Here's the short version: if you have an iPad, and you listen to music, go to the App Store and download Planetary right now. It's that good. Planetary is a free music visualizer for the iPad, and if its design ethos looks somewhat familiar, there's a reason. Bloom Studio, maker of Planetary, has Robert Hodgins as its Creative Director. The name may not be familiar to you right away, but his work likely is: he designed the Magnetosphere iTunes visualizer, which found its way into iTunes 8. My colleague Mel Martin notes that Bloom's president Ben Cerveny was one of the original designers of Flickr. Magnetosphere is pretty cool on the Mac, but Planetary on the iPad blows it away with its aesthetics and its features. You can navigate through your entire music library using Planetary's interface, from a galaxy of stars representing artists all the way down to song moons circling album planets. You can view a walkthrough of the interface on the next page.
Why did Pluto lose its planet status? Because it never mattered enough
It's kind of hard to accept, Pluto has always been our favorite underdog, but the truth is that the Solar System's ninth planet was never really significant enough to earn that designation. Such is the coldly logical reason given for its removal from the planetary annals by a man who had a lot to do with its demise. Caltech astronomer Mike Brown discovered Eris, what he'd hoped was the tenth planet, back in 2005, but its extreme distance from the Sun and diminutive (by planetary standards) dimensions disqualified it from consideration. Unfortunately, its discovery is what doomed Pluto to be downgraded to a "dwarf planet," though Mike's not shedding too many tears over it. In fact, he's gone and written a book about the whole thing, the smug planet destroyer that he is. You don't have to buy it to learn more, however, as the source link has an interview with Mike all ready and waiting.
