In this week’s Journeys Issue, Burkhard Bilger writes about NASA’s recent successful effort to send the rover Curiosity to Mars. Here’s a selection of images from Curiosity as it cruises the surface of Mars in search of clues of past, present, and future about a planet that seems strikingly similar to Earth: http://nyr.kr/YsvI67

 Click-through for a look back at 20 of the most striking images of our home planet as seen from orbit in 2012: http://nyr.kr/UosuxW, images courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory,

(Source: newyorker.com)

Hendrik Hertzberg on where Sally Ride rode, and where she didn’t: http://nyr.kr/MZjEF8

What Dr. Ride did not do, though, was what I, for one, had hoped she would do: rocket into political orbit, as John Glenn (D-Ohio) and Harrison Schmitt (R-New Mexico) did so successfully. The reason she didn’t, I suspect, was also the reason she was not only “reserved and reticent” but was also—the Times obit again—“known for guarding her privacy” and was described by a friend (who said, “I had to interrogate her to find out what was happening in her personal life”) as “elusive and enigmatic, protective of her emotions.”

(Photograph: NASA)

…she was a heroine, especially to many girls. She openly acknowledged that the women’s movement had made her trip to space possible—that it didn’t just happen. She told reporters at the time of her flight, “It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.” Again, that was her work; she had a sense of what it meant to be a role model, to be Sally Ride. Perhaps she thought that parents would not buy the children’s science books that she co-wrote with O’Shaughnessy, who helped run Sally Ride Science and was described on its Web site as her “friend,” if they thought the authors were lesbians. The more troubling question there is not for Ride but for the rest of us: If that was her fear, was she right? Have we, as a nation, not been ready to let a lesbian inspire our daughters to fly, if they want to, to the moon, and back?

Amy Davidson on The Astronaut Bride: Sally Ride and her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy http://nyr.kr/NJtbAW

(Image courtesy of NASA)

Ever since putting together our slide show of the transit of Venus, I’ve been following NASA’s Goddard Flight Center on Instagram. Recently the center posted an image of a crater on Mars that bore a startling resemblance to Mickey Mouse. Inspired by this, and also reminded of a childhood desire to see shapes in clouds, I decided to troll the NASA archive for space formations that look like earth objects.

 

When it comes to outer space, resemblance is often a fleeting thing. “Galaxies change shape significantly as they interact gravitationally and even collide and merge with other galaxies, as the Milky Way and Andromeda are one day expected to do,” Frank Reddy, a NASA senior science writer, told me. “Nebulas are vast clouds of gas and dust, and they morph under the influence of powerful outflows and intense radiation from the stars and star clusters within them. Impact craters change via the same factors that alter any landscape: erosion by wind, flowing water, glaciers, living organisms, earthquakes, volcanoes and even the formation of new impact craters nearby.” (Results may vary depending on local conditions: “No wind or life on the moon,” he noted.)

  

Click-through for more images of space at its most suggestive, with captions from NASA: http://nyr.kr/NI3vFH

Cartoon of the day. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/I0llN0

(Source: newyorker.com)

The apotheosis of our year-end round-ups: The best NASA photographs of 2010.