Over the next six years, we will be observing the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Program, the series of NASA manned missions that ultimately put astronauts on the surface of the Moon.

I'll be posting in this topic as we reach each major milestone and I'll briefly describe them.


Tomorrow, January 27, marks the 50th anniversary of the tragic fire that claimed the lives of all three astronauts on Apollo 1: Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. The investigation that followed led to a series of adjustments and improvements (such as redesigning the hatch, removing flammable materials, and not having the air inside be pure oxygen), but it would be 20 months before the next crewed mission would attempt to liftoff.

The opening ceremony is tomorrow, so I figured it was time to once again create a new topic for the upcoming Olympic games.

Numerous controversies aside, what is everyone looking forward to seeing over the next few weeks?

Tomorrow will be the first match of the 2015 FIFA Woman's World Cup in Canada. Apparently, this will be the first one in which 24 teams get to compete instead of just 16, so a lot of countries have been able to make their very first appearance in this tournament.

Unlike in the men's division we saw last year, I'm expecting to see team USA to go all the way and win the final match. After all, this team has never done worse than third place in any previous World Cup.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space.

I'm sure that many of you have seen pictures of the universe that were taken by this orbiting observatory. Despite it's early problems, it has certainly provided us with breathtaking views of the universe like never before. And the fact that it's still operating very well after 25 years in space is very remarkable.

http://www.space.com/27059-jupiter-moon-eu...-tectonics.html

According to a recent analysis of images taken by the Galileo space probe from over ten years ago, it's possible that Jupiter's icy moon Europa may have plate tectonics, which would make it the first known world besides Earth to have such a system.

Since these "plates" would be made of ice instead of rock, it would work a little differently than what we're familiar with on Earth, but the process is basically the same. Plates that diverge create space for new material to rise up (which has already been determined for a while now), and where plates converge, one slips underneath the other and the old material is recycled into the interior (which is what the recent analysis was able to determine). This could explain why the surface of Europa is relatively young.

This also might have an impact on the possibility of life on Europa. These plates likely don't extend through the entire thickness of the solid crust, but it could gradually help to bring nutrients and other material from the surface down to the ocean of liquid water underneath.

I find this to be quite a fascinating discovery.

www.space.com/26309-comet-siding-spring-mars-spacecraft.html

Less than a month ago, a new comet was discovered on its first journey into the solar system. What makes this one significant is that, on October 19 later this year, it is expected to pass very close by to Mars (83,000mi/132,000km), much closer than the Moon is to Earth, close enough for the comet's coma to actually interact with the Martian atmosphere. I don't think there has ever been a comet passing this close to Earth in all of recorded history, so this really is a rare event. Considering all of the space probes currently on or orbiting Mars, this should make for quite a remarkable scientific opportunity.

A little something I found yesterday.

http://www.stefanom.org/super-planet-crash/
(The link to the actual game is at the top of this article.)

This is quite a neat game. The objective is to create a solar system that can remain stable for 500 game years. If just one planet either crashes into another or gets flung outside, you lose. You always start with just one Earth-mass planet, but you can always add more with either the same or higher masses. You get more points for more planets and more massive planets.

After over a dozen tries, I've had only one success for far. Sadly, I did not think to save the link, but I do remember getting a score of just over 190,000. (Compared to some other high scores I've seen, that's actually not much.)

Go ahead and give it a try.

Ten years ago today (March 17th), I joined a forum for the very first time. It was BZPower, the Bionicle fan site. I had joined because I was reading one particular fanfiction that I really liked, and wanted to leave a comment or two. Over the months that followed, I learned a lot of things about interacting with other people on the internet, and some lessons came the hard way.

The most notable example was what I call "my biggest blunder on the internet". (Unfortunately, there is no way for me to show it to you. The archived forum of 2001-2010 was completely wiped out by a hacker attack last year.) After a particularly long time had passed since the latest update to that fanfic, I eventually got frustrated and left an angry comment, throwing in a profane word for good measure (censoring only the vowel, because I had foolishly thought that would be enough). I quickly received a warning for that. I apologized just as quickly and made sure I wouldn't repeat that mistake ever again. Not long after that, the review topic was closed and a new one was made (on BZPower, the actual story and the comments have to be in separate topics). I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one responsible for driving the author to do that, but the fact that I was still one of those people stuck with me. It's why, to this day, you will never see me use profanity online, and very rarely in real life, too. Ultimately, the lesson I learned for this incident is that people you communicate with online actually have lives outside of the internet, so you shouldn't expect them to respond as quickly as you'd like.

I did slip up a few more times after that, but none were bad enough to receive another warning, so I won't go into further detail. Once that certain fanfic was finally finished a few months later, my activity slowed down a bit. I was still just as excited about Bionicle, but I had lost interest in communicating with others. It wasn't until October 2012 that I finally decided to log in to BZPower regularly again, if only to read interesting comments and hardly post anything. (As fate would have it, this would turn out to be the first of many steps that ultimately led me to becoming a fan of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but that's another story.)

I joined GoF in December 2007, more than three and a half years after joining my first forum. I think the lessons I learned back in 2004 helped to give me more realistic expectations when I first came to this site, allowing me to get along well with everyone and even have the confidence to write my own fanfiction for the first time ever (an experience that officially proved to me why you should never expect too much from a fanfiction writer, because now I was one). As the years passed, I have seen some then-new members here (I won't name them, even if I could remember them) who behaved pretty much the same way I did back in 2004. Some (like me) have since learned their lessons, while others sadly haven't. All of this has led me to create this word of wisdom: "Everyone makes dumb mistakes when they're 13." (I went with that particular number because that's how old I was when I made "my biggest blunder on the internet", and that seems to be the age of most of those then-new members I mentioned.)

I've definitely come a long way in the last ten years. I may have had a rough start, but once I understood what was and wasn't acceptable, I've had almost no trouble to speak of. As someone who always had extreme difficulty talking to others in person, the time I've spent communicating with others on forums like this has helped to ease my anxiety and make me just a little bit more comfortable talking to others. I don't know what lies ahead for me, but I'm very confident that my worst moments (at least, when it comes to the internet) have long since passed.

Ten years ago today (January 24, 2004), the NASA Mars rover named Opportunity landed on Mars. It's mission, to search for evidence of water, was intended to last for only 90 days. To this day, that rover is still operating and in relatively good shape, having traveled more than 24 miles in it's lifetime to date. And it seems unlikely the mission will be ending anytime soon.

I have to say, that is quite impressive.