Fun Facts

Apollo Sites Revisited

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:30:55 -0400

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, launched on June 18, 2009 aboard an Atlas V from Launch Complex 41.

LRO has been orbiting the moon since then in an eccentric polar mapping orbit traveling at 1.6 km/s. That means its height varies between 50 and 200km from the lunar surface, so sometimes it gets a really close look at the moon where one pixel of its camera covers as little as 0.5 meters.

Of all the things it can see up close, the most interesting are the Apollo landing sites. It can clearly pick out the descent stage, or the landing legs, of the LMs that were left behind. It can even pick up the trails made by the astronauts footsteps.

But LRO can see much more than just the landing sites... it can see the tracks made by the LRV during the later three missions and we can now map accurately where the astronauts went!

Apollo 15

Apollo 15 was sent to sample Hadley Rille, a deep, long channel with mountains nearby. The early scouting of landing sites led to a sketch of what Apollo 15’s EVAs would look like.

The LRO gave us the opportunity to check NASA’s work...

Apollo 16

Similarly with Apollo 16, the EVAs were planned:

and LRO has photographed the astronauts’ tracks...

Here’s Charlie Duke at Plum Crater, close to Flag Crater on EVA 1:

And here is North Ray crater taken from LRO showing House Rock (so named because it was the size of a house).

John Young at North Ray Crater with House Rock behind him:

Apollo 17

As I mentioned in another entry, Apollo 17 was sent to the Taurus-Littrow Valley where they sampled rocks from a landslide at southerly Station 2 caused by material ejected from crater Tycho that traveled over a thousand miles and landed near the Apollo 17 landing site.

Station 6 is about as far north as the astronauts traveled. Here they found a huge boulder that had rolled down a 25° slope from a rock outcrop about 500 meters up the North Massif slope and broke apart at the bottom. The slope was too steep for the LRV to go any further, but LRO photographed the 20-million-year-old boulder track that Jack Schmitt stood in...

You can just make out the LRV tracks approaching the boulder from the south-east.

The LRO really has brought another dimension to what the Apollo photos already showed us from on the lunar surface.

The Meaning of Life

Sun, 30 Jun 2002 15:23:41 -0400

“There is always hope” - Banksy, 2002

"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." - Richard Feynman

"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it." - Albert Einstein

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." - Sir Isaac Newton

“Everybody wants happiness, nobody wants pain; but there can't be a rainbow without a little rain.” - Dolly Parton

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.” - Shakespeare (Macbeth)

“You don't need religion to have morals. If you can't determine right from wrong then you lack empathy, not religion.” - Anon

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." - William Arthur Ward

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” - old proverb

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” - Mark Twain

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” - Albert Einstein

“The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is getting it done.” - Chinese Proverb

“Enriched by a singular event that is larger than life, I no longer have the luxury of being ordinary. To stand on the lunar surface and look back at our Earth creates such a personal sense of awe that even Alan Shepard wept at the view. Trying to exist within the paradox of being in this world after visiting another may be why some Moon voyagers tend to be reclusive.” - Gene Cernan

“Some are born to move the world
To live their fantasy,
But most of us just dream about
The things we’d like to be”
- Rush

The Challenger Disaster

Tue, 28 Jan 1986 17:28:43 -0500

Challenger started out as Structural Test Article STA-099; later converted to space flight it was designated Orbiter Vehicle OV-099. Challenger was lighter than her sister, Columbia, and could carry 1,100kg (1.2 tons) of extra payload. Even with Discovery and Atlantis to share the flights, Challenger flew half of the 20 shuttle missions between her maiden voyage and her last flight: 10 launches, 25.8 million miles, 62 days in space, 995 orbits of Earth, and at least a dozen space firsts:
First Shuttle spacewalk - Story Musgrave and Donald Peterson, STS-6
First female astronaut - Sally Ride, STS-7
First African-American - Guion “Guy” Bluford, first Shuttle night launch and first Shuttle night landing, STS-8
First untethered space walk - Bruce McCandless II, STS-41B
First spacewalk by a woman - Kathy Sullivan, first launch with two women - Ride and Sullivan, first Canadian - Marc Garneau, STS-41G
First and only post launch abort (abort to orbit, resulting in a lower altitude orbit), STS-51F
First Dutchman - Wobbo Ockels, STS-61A
First Shuttle fatalities, STS-51L...
 

On Jan 28, 1986, STS-51L suffered a "major malfunction" and broke up shortly after throttle-up, 73 seconds after launch, at 48,000 feet (9 miles), 7 nautical miles downrange and traveling at about 2,100 feet/second (1,450 mph or Mach 1.9).
 

It was the 25th Shuttle mission and Challenger’s 10th flight in less than 3 years. Challenger was flown more frequently than the other three Shuttles once she was flight worthy in 1983. But the flight schedule was a busy one and Challenger, Discovery and Atlantis were launching frequently with satellite payloads.

There was a lot of pressure at NASA and the 25th Shuttle mission had already been delayed by potentially bad weather at the launch site, bad weather at an abort landing site and on the previous day by a hatch bolt that sheared as it was tightened… the battery operated drill used to remove it ran out of power and NASA had no back-up battery for it. By the time the bolt was out, the tanks had had to be emptied and the launch postponed to the next day, when cold temperatures were predicted.

The cold was causing concern with the engineers at Morton Thiokol where the Solid Rocket Boosters were built. Allan McDonald, the Thiokol engineer at the Florida launch, refused to sign the approval for the launch. A telecon between Thiokol and the NASA SRB team was scheduled for the evening of Jan 27...

The catastrophe was caused by O-ring failure in the righthand SRB due to launching at 28F (-2C), when the O-rings would be too rigid to seal as the SRB joints would flex.

The black smoke plumes seen pulsing for the first three seconds of launch are the result of the o-ring failure. However, it is believed that the gap was quickly sealed by solidified aluminum oxide by-product.

Max-Q is the point in the flight at around 59 seconds into the flight at an altitude of around 35,000 feet where the vehicle experiences maximum aerodynamic pressure (as the Shuttle is moving faster but the air is still not so thin). This caused significant vibration of the stack even with the engines throttled down to 65%. The first evidence of flame on the right SRB aft field joint was seen at 59 seconds.

From 37 seconds the vehicle had been experiencing crosswinds. Just after Max-Q at around 64 seconds, the shuttle is believed to have flown through the jet-stream - it is a rare event for it to be so Southerly, but also connected with the cold weather. The forces of this extreme cross wind caused the boosters to gimble to maintain the correct course. This action flexed the booster structure, dislodging the remaining solids blocking the burnt O-rings. Challenger had run out of luck and the blow-by past the O-rings increased significantly at around 64 seconds.

At this point the engines were throttling back up to 104%. At 68 seconds CAPCOM, astronaut Dick Covey, told Scobee “Challenger, Go at throttle up,” and at 70 seconds Scobee replied “Roger, Go at throttle up.”

It took about 8 seconds for the blow-by plume to burn through the lower support holding the SRB to the external tank, and once it was loose the SRB rotated. This caused a significant lateral acceleration at 72.5 seconds. On a tape from a ‘black box recorder’ recovered weeks later, Mike Smith was heard to say “Uh, oh” at 73 seconds. The loose SRB then rotated back and ruptured the ET causing uncontrolled burning of the liquid hydrogen and oxygen and consequently, in a matter of milliseconds, the disintegration of the ET that holds the stack together at 73.2 seconds. This was immediately followed by 100 milliseconds of interference on the downlink, the subsequent break-up of the orbiter and complete loss of signal 74.1 seconds after launch.
 

Artist John Berkey’s impression could well be very accurate.

The forces of the break-up at around 12G were survivable and no more than an ejection seat in a fighter jet, and only brief - for a couple of seconds; it is unlikely that the crew were badly injured. After 10 seconds the crew cabin (or forward fuselage) was essentially in a 'free fall' trajectory. The slowly tumbling, intact crew cabin was photographed missing its nose cone at the front, and trailing cables from the rear. It had a peak trajectory of 65,000 feet (12 miles) 25 seconds later and stabilized in a nose-down attitude caused by the drag of the trailing cable harness. After a further two minutes and twenty seconds the crew module hit the Atlantic ocean about 16 miles or so east of the launch pad.

At least some of the crew were conscious after Challenger broke up, evidenced by manual activation of 3 of the 4 recovered personal egress air packs, and by pilot Mike Smith having activated several switches. Ellison Onizuka, seated behind the pilot, activated Mike Smith's PEAP. Commander Dick Scobee's PEAP was not activated - it is unlikely that Judy Resnik could reach it while strapped in.

It is doubtful that the cabin depressurized, or it did so slowly, and consequently the crew are likely to have been conscious until the left-hand forward corner (near Dick Scobee's seat) hit the water at about 200mph, whereupon the crew cabin broke apart under forces of about 200G and the crew died instantly, still strapped into their seats. If the cabin had landed gently, they could have swam home.

During the recovery search, the crew cabin (known as ‘Object D’ on radio transmissions) was identified as sonar contact 0067.

During the search the site was known as "Target 67" within a debris field about 5 miles by 7 miles around Hetzel Shoal within the area labeled G on the salvage map, about 16 miles east of the pad at 28.64° north, 80.28° west.

The crew cabin was formally identified on March 8th and US Navy divers on the USS Preserver completed recovery of the debris by April 4th. Six of the crew were recovered almost 6 weeks after the accident from a depth of 100 feet below the surface of the Atlantic.

The last crew member, Greg Jarvis, floated away and was lost to divers as they attempted his recovery, but found a month later some 0.7 nautical miles from the crew cabin. Greg Jarvis had been bumped from two previous flights, from April 1985 and earlier in Jan 1986 to make room for members of congress to fly; Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) and Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla).

The crew cabin showed no signs of burn damage; only damage from impact with the water.

Other parts of the orbiter and SRBs were found during the recovery. And some washed up on the shore much later.

NASA issued a statement that the crew had died instantly, vaporized by the explosion. They even issued death certificates on Jan 30, which was legally inappropriate before the crew remains were found. They stuck to their story. They kept the crew remains under armed guard and denied the medical examiner the opportunity to perform autopsies and issue real death certificates, which were his legal duty. NASA wanted to maintain the idea that nobody suffered at any cost (presumably to soften the PR nightmare of having killed 7 people through dereliction of management duties) just like they had for the Apollo 1 fire after which Betty Grissom had to sue NASA to find out what really happened to her husband.

During April the critical pieces of the aft joint of the right SRB were located by sonar (sonar contacts 131 and 712) 35 miles from the launchpad, at a depth of 560 feet, and recovered.

They revealed a hole about 28" wide with soot-blistered paint around its edge, proving the burn-through theory. The O-ring failed on the SRB at a point only two feet from the ET and the SRB support. Had it occurred at a point facing outward, away from the ET, the disintegration of the stack may not have happened, but the SRB would have had to burn for at least another 50 seconds before SRB separation.
 

There were no data for launch below 54F (+12C) and the O-ring 'redline' was supposedly 39F (+4C). The temperature of the SRB at launch was about 28F (-2C).

STS 51-C had launched in Jan a year earlier, at around 54F. One O-ring had burned through, and the second O-ring was damaged but had held. In their report of Feb 1985 Thiokol engineers expressed for the first time a significant concern with O-ring function and low temperatures. It’s not actually rocket science to see the risk increase if you extrapolate from the STS 51-C data:

The warnings from Morton Thiokol engineers Roger Boisjoly and Bob Ebeling about temperature and O-ring failure and the recommendation to wait for warmer temperatures of at least 53F did not go down well with NASA; "My God, Thiokol," responded Lawrence Mulloy of NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center, and NASA project manager of the SRB program, "when do you want me to launch? Next April?" NASA's own policy stated that failure of Criticality 1 components cannot be relied on with only one back-up system (especially when the secondary O-ring was similarly out of specification at that low temperature), and in spite of the Thiokol engineers unanimous recommendation, NASA's SRB project leaders persuaded Thiokol management to reverse their no-go (without informing other NASA bosses - another breach of NASA protocol).

Bob Ebeling went on to help restore the 65,000-acre Bear River migratory bird refuge in Utah, and Roger Boisjoly used the Challenger disaster as an example in his lectures on leadership and workplace ethics.

Roger Boisjoly was given the Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility by the American Association for the Advancement of Science "For his exemplary and repeated efforts to fulfill his professional responsibilities as an engineer by alerting others to life-threatening design problems of the Challenger space shuttle and for steadfastly recommending against the tragic launch of January 1986."

The disaster was investigated by the Rogers Commission, made up of several senior and high profile individuals. The famous physicist Richard Feynman was part of the Rogers Commission along with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride.

In a closed hearing Lawrence Mulloy testified that there had been no proof that the cold temperature was unsafe. He simply said that Thiokol had some concerns but approved the launch. In his testimony that had a loose affiliation with the truth, he neglected to say that the approval came only after Thiokol executives, under intense pressure from NASA officials, overruled the engineers.

"I was sitting there thinking that's about as deceiving as anything I ever heard," McDonald recalled. He was not supposed to speak, but he was courageous, stood up, and interrupted proceedings. "So... I said I think this presidential commission should know that Morton Thiokol was so concerned, we recommended not launching below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. And we put that in writing and sent that to NASA."

It quickly became apparent that NASA and Morton Thiokol were not being transparent about the O-ring problem. Astronaut Sally Ride was given data from Morton Thiokol about the performance of, and damage to O-rings in launches at cool temperatures. She risked her career and gave this piece of paper to Major General Kutyna, whom she knew could pass it to Richard Feynman. Kutyna kept this secret until Ride died in 2012.

After he saw the O-ring temperature data, Feynman had to figure out how to make this known without revealing the leak, so he performed a very simple experiment with some iced water that blew open the idea that there was no evidence the O-rings were unsafe at cold temperatures.
https://youtu.be/6TInWPDJhjU

Feynman was very critical of NASA management and insisted that his findings on the matter be included in the Rogers report.

In Appendix F of the report from October 1986 Feynman stated:

“It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask ‘What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?’... It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.”

Feynman added "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Many of the engineers at Morton Thiokol were devastated by the tragedy and never outlived their feelings of guilt. Lawrence Mulloy never felt any guilt and maintained that he would make the same decision to launch.

It was 21 months before the next Shuttle launch, and astronaut Dick Covey who had been CAPCOM when Challenger exploded was Discovery’s pilot.

In all, only about 45% of the wreckage was recovered. Without fuel, the Shuttle stack weighed almost 280 tons, and no more than 118 tons of debris was found.

In January 1987, almost a year after the disaster, all of the recovered debris was transferred to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, about about 2 miles south of the launch site. There the debris was placed in two disused Minuteman missile silos, LC-31 and LC-32, each 12’ in diameter and 90’ deep.

Some of the larger pieces were cut up to fit, including the right wing and larger sections of the external tank. Over the next few weeks 102 crates were stored and each silo capped with a 10,000 lb concrete slab.

One of the left wing elevons (wing flap) measuring about 6’ by 15’ washed up at Cocoa Beach 15 miles south of the launch site in December 1996. This was also placed in one of the silos.

The section from Challenger’s left side bearing the Star-Spangled Banner was removed from the silo and put on display in 2015 as a memorial at the Kennedy Space Center.

From left to right: Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, Judy Resnik, CDR Dick Scobee, Ron McNair, PLT Mike Smith, and Ellison Onizuka

The Mandelbrot Set

Sat, 1 Mar 1980 11:01:16 -0500

On June 5th, 1978, a mathematics conference at Stony Brook began at which Robert Brooks and Peter Matelski published an abstract on the subject of Kleinian groups (whatever they are). In their abstract they described a mathematical equation and showed an illustration of the output. This is what their 1978 state-of-the-art computer was able to print out for them. It is unmistakably what would become known as the Mandelbrot Set!

The incredible complexity contained within those inauspicious rows of asterisks is created by this amazingly simple equation:

But it would take time and better computers to reveal that complexity.

They did not present at the conference but their abstract was included in the proceedings of the conference; they circulated a pre-print of their article early in 1979, and Brooks presented their findings at Harvard in Spring of 1979. Mandelbrot claimed not to have seen the presentation and their paper was not published until early 1981.

Back in 1976, John Hubbard started working on a method using computers to map out sets of complex numbers using Newton’s method. Frederick Kochman, one of Hubbard’s graduate students, went to a conference in late 1978. He approached Benoit Mandelbrot and showed him some of Hubbard’s work.

Mandelbrot later wrote to Hubbard saying "When sampling the works of Fatou and Julia, I had thought of doing these things myself, but had not mustered the courage. Nevertheless I can claim that I was awaiting your pictures for a long long time."

The inspiration this gave Mandelbrot is undoubtable. Hubbard visited the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center where Mandelbrot worked and where they had serious computer power.

Hubbard told Mandelbrot how to program the computer to plot these iterative functions.

Hubbard admitted to not understanding the importance of what he had found. Brooks and Matelski also did not appreciate the significance of this mathematical phenomenon.

On March 1st, 1980, Mandelbrot first saw a computer representation of the now-famous iterative set. When Mandelbrot published his pictures in 1980 he noted the ‘dust’ surrounding the fractal. Because of this dust, Mandelbrot speculated that the set was discontinuous. The editors of the journal, however, removed the dust from the illustration, assuming it was an artifact of the printer! This dust was a result of tiny intricate islands connected by as-yet invisible filaments that would only be understood years later.

But, for all of this ‘high-powered’ computer work, what credit should be given to Pierre Fatou, the French mathematician, who was the first to propose the set as a result of his work in 1906 on what would become known as Julia sets. Without computers he could not have realized the notion of chaos contained in the simple equation. Later Gaston Julia would do great work on these sets that Mandelbrot would name after him. Mandelbrot studied under Julia in the 1940s.

Mandelbrot was the one to realize what had been discovered. He even claimed to be the one who discovered it. He realized that Julia sets were fractals and that the Mandelbrot set was the general set in which each point represents an individual Julia set. Mandelbrot was certainly the one who wrote about it, coined the term fractal and got James Gleick interested to include it in his best-selling 1987 book “Chaos”, which I thoroughly recommend.

Here is Mandelbrot with the Koch fractal chalked on the board behind him:

And here he is later in life on the lecture circuit:

However, the fact that Mandelbrot was so ungracious in sharing the credit for the discovery irked the others. While Mandelbrot claimed that no one else understood what they had found, Matelski was quoted as saying (in the Hartford Courant, a newspaper that reported on the dispute in December 1989) “You don't have to fully exploit the mineral resources of a continent to discover it. All you have to do is kneel down and kiss the beach."

So what of this discovery? Why all the fuss? Perhaps because it is the most intricate, complex, fascinating and beautiful object in all of mathematics...

The Koch fractal is a neat way to illustrate a fractal. Start with a triangle. For every line, make the middle third of the line into a triangle. And again for every line. And again. Each time you add length to the outline, but the area will never be bigger than the circle you can draw around that original triangle.

When you’re done (but since it’s infinite, you’d never really be done) you will have created the Koch snowflake. Real snowflakes are an example of fractals in nature, along with things like trees and mountains... the closer you look, the more you see repeating patterns that look like the thing as a whole. Here’s a tree fractal:

The equation for the Mandelbrot set contains c as a complex number. If you start with z=0 and test a value for c, you then take the result as the next value for z. And again, just like for the Koch snowflake. And again. Each time taking the result as the next value for z. If the result tends to infinity it belongs outside the Mandelbrot set. If the result remains bounded and does not tend towards infinity, the point is part of the Mandelbrot set.

For any point contained within the Mandelbrot set, the corresponding Julia set is an infinitely complex but completely connected.

For each point outside the Mandelbrot set, the corresponding Julia set is an infinite array of islands.

Here’s one of the infinite number of Julia sets at higher resolution...

Traditionally a point within the Mandelbrot set is colored black. The points outside the set are colored according to how quickly they tend towards infinity. It’s that boundary at the edge of the set that is so utterly amazing. The tiniest change in the starting condition can dramatically affect the result, and the Mandelbrot fractal has become an illustration and icon for chaos theory.

Hubbard and Douady proved that all the tiny, intricate details, all the tiny islands or particles of dust, are connected. The length of the perimeter of the fractal is infinite, but its area is no bigger than 1.5066 (that’s a bit like saying that pi has an infinite number of digits, but it will never have a value more than 3.1416). The fractal does not extend beyond a circle with a radius of 2 (-2 and +2 on the x or y axes).

Of course, today computers can makes millions of iterations and calculate to so many decimal places for values of c that we can zoom into the Mandelbrot set a billion-fold to view an infinite world of patterns. You can do this on your iPhone... there are apps on the App store; check out Fast Fractal, no math needed!

But is it art? These images answer that for me in no uncertain terms!

Mandelbrot zoom from Wikipedia with center at (-0.743643887037158704752191506114774, 0.131825904205311970493132056385139)
and magnification 1 to 3.18×10^31

(10^31 is a LOT... There are roughly 10^24 stars in the whole universe! And about 10^50 atoms in the entire Earth)

And here are pictures of the Mandelbrot set that I made...

Instead of color... you can use the iterations to define contours and render in 3d:

A Fascination with Electronica

Thu, 2 Dec 1976 13:37:42 -0500

When I was about 15, I saw a weekly BBC science programme called Horizon - an episode on time-lapse photography. They used a track that captivated me and I wrote to the BBC to ask what the playlist was. The track was a 1976 track from a year or so earlier by French composer Jean-Michel Jarre; Oxygene part II:

https://youtu.be/KRWlw0M-rdw

40 years to the day after the release of Oxygene, Jarre released the third album in the Oxygene trilogy. Part 17 is one of my favorite tracks.

https://youtu.be/9WUoT6GVtXI

A few months after hearing that first Oxygene track, my sister’s boyfriend gave me a tape of German band Tangerine Dream; as a filler, the tape contained the track Cloudburst Flight from their 1979 album Force Majeure.

https://youtu.be/i4Ni-HsWldg

I fell in love with the last two minutes or so. The track represents a flight through a storm, and I think the end is where the sun comes out... that seemed to be how I felt musically hearing it for the first time. I then embarked on a 40-year love affair with Tangerine Dream’s ever-changing electronic music. They had already been pioneers of synthesized ‘music’ since 1968.

And how could I do a history of electronica without Kraftwerk? Another German band with a 1974 album called Autobahn, which I only discovered in 1980. Just love the baseline. Simple lyrics... “Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn.”

https://youtu.be/1DO-Ddqbqgs

It’s not hard to see where my fascination with synthesizers comes from!

And to bring it up to date, one of my favorite tracks from one of my favorite bands of the last few years; Koven playing ‘Lasting’ live.

https://youtu.be/rOPlxqAWbd4

I love Katie and Max. They’re such nice people. She has the voice of an angel and he is a God of drum & bass.

As mentioned in the Radiophonic Workshop entry, Orbital is one of my favorites. My favorite track of theirs is a track from 2012 called “Where is it Going?”

https://youtu.be/Z8QcwjdrTM8

On stage they still use their old 1980s synthesizers to keep the same sound of their original music.

Their track called “Halcyon” has a pretty surreal video; a track named after the tranquilizer Halcion, to which their mother was addicted. You can imagine her feeling like this doing the dishes in real life.

https://youtu.be/3SwwljI-8JY

And last but not least, my favorite deadmau5 track. Warning: You can’t unsee this sh*t... it’s rather surreal.

https://youtu.be/UG3sfZKtCQI

I saw deadmau5 play on the Cube V3 tour in Washington DC and in Philly (where I got to meet him). The sound at The Anthem in DC was the loudest and purest I have ever heard.

At the end of the Monophobia video, filmed at his home and CGI added later, you get to see his colossal modular synth taking up the wall of his studio, in the background. My little modular analog set-up is not really impressive at all!

Obliquity of the Ecliptic

Wed, 1 Sep 1976 11:45:35 -0400

When I was a kid I learned, courtesy of the Vangelis track “Albedo 0.39” released in Sept 1976, that the obliquity of the ecliptic was 23°27′8.26″. But apparently that is no longer true!

Earth's obliquity oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees on a 41,000-year cycle.

Based on a complicated equation, the Earth’s obliquity is continuously updated by the Jet Propulsion Labs;

ε = 23°26′21.406″ − 46.836769″ T − 0.0001831″ T2 + 0.00200340″ T3 − 0.576×10−6″ T4 − 4.34×10−8″ T5

As of 2021 Earth's mean obliquity was 84381.4 arcsec, or 23°26′21.4″ (or 23.439°) and decreasing.

And since the Earth’s albedo was determined in the 1970s to be 0.39, it has also decreased... to 0.30.

Interestingly, the Astronomical Unit is defined as the mean distance from the Sun, which according to Vangelis was 92,957,200 miles. This value used to vary depending on the length of the day and other factors.

Since then 1AU has been fixed at a value of 149,597,870,700 meters, or 92,955,807.3 miles

Thankfully, JPL tells us that the speed of light in a vacuum is still 299,792,458 m/s. Some things never change.

If Apollo Landed on Earth

Sun, 20 Jul 1969 08:41:36 -0400

The six Apollo moon landings spread across a big part of the face of the moon, mostly not too far from the equator and where previous surveys had been done...

But it’s hard to comprehend how far apart the landings were. So what if they had landed on Earth?

And what of all the Extra Vehicular Activity, or EVA? Just how far did they go once they were on the moon? The Earth equivalent of a home run, to a vacation driving around Paris...

Apollo 11

While Buzz stayed near the Lunar Module setting up equipment, during their 2 1/2 hour EVA Neil walked to the nearest crater no further away than the edge of a baseball field (with the LM on the mound), or not even as far as the opponents’ penalty area (with the LM on the penalty spot).

Neil took a panorama from the edge of Little West Crater looking back at the LM; this is the furthest away he got.

“One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” - Neil Armstrong

Apollo 12

In 7 3/4 hours of total EVA time, Pete Conrad and Al Bean were able to cover a lot more ground. They did a pin-point landing right by the Surveyor lander, both of which would fit into the Colosseum, and their EVAs took them around the Colosseum for a wander round the center of Rome.

Here is Pete taking a look at the Surveyor III:

Apollo 14

Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell would have spent plenty of time in Washington DC and would have been very familiar with the walk along the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial. During their two EVAs totaling 9 1/2 hours they would walk to the river, and then as far as the Washington Monument.

Apollo 14 landed where Apollo 13 had been planned to land, in the Fra-Mauro Highlands. Al Shepard was the first American in space almost 10 years earlier, and after an operation to correct vertigo that had grounded him since his first Mercury flight, he was commander of Apollo 14.

The walk in DC will make your feet tired, but for Al and Ed on EVA 2, it was all uphill and hard to navigate. They were exhausted and had to turn back... they missed Cone Crater, their primary mission target, by about 20 meters!

The mission is most famous for Al Shepard playing golf on the moon at the end of EVA 2, which was caught on video by the LM.

Apollo 15

Dave Scott and Jim Irwin flew the first J-mission, which meant that they were equipped to stay on the moon for longer, take longer EVAs and they took the first Lunar Roving Vehicle, or LRV. Their three EVAs totaled more than 19 hours, during which time they drove around much of Manhattan from the UN building west to Times Square on the edge of the Hadley Rille, then past the Empire State Building to West Village, and lastly down to the Lower East Side.

Apollo 15 was lucky. It’s almost impossible to see the lunar surface slope as you get close, and you can’t see a crater if it’s behind the LM as it’s coming down, and once the LM engine kicks up dust it’s a lot down to luck exactly how you land. One of the pads of Intrepid stood in the edge of a crater, causing the LM to lean 11 degrees from vertical. Any more than 12 degrees and the ascent stage can’t lift off again!

Dave Scott smuggled aboard 400 first day covers (stamped envelopes) that would later be sold for a lot of money as ‘flown artefacts’. The astronauts were each paid $7,000 ($40,000 in 2020 money) by a stamp dealer for 100 envelopes, and each astronaut kept 100 for themselves. When NASA found out about it after the mission, the astronauts paid back the money and got grounded (they were back-up crew for Apollo 17 and were replaced). None of them flew in space again.

Apollo 16

John Young and Charlie Duke also had an LRV for their three EVAs and over 20 hours on the lunar surface. They would have managed to drive the length of Sydney. With the LM parked in the harbor, they would have crossed the harbor bridge to get to North Ray Crater, and Stone Mountain would have been the same distance to the south of the city.

On EVA 3, on his last day on the moon, Charlie Duke left behind a family photograph on the dusty lunar surface. It has probably faded already spending two weeks a month in unfiltered sunlight, but it will be millions of years before meteorite impacts cover it with dust.

Apollo 17

Last but not least, in three EVAs lasting over 22 hours, Gene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt would have driven from the LM at the Notre Dame west to the Eiffel Tower and all the way along the Seine to the edge of Paris, 7.6 km from the LM, and back, and then almost as far north as the Sacre Coeur.

Apollo 17 was the first mission where none of the crew had been test pilots. Having taken Joe Engle’s seat (Joe had been a test pilot), Jack Schmitt was the first civilian astronaut; he was a geologist and was the expert in the rocks the mission was sent to find... they were looking for ancient rocks and found orange soil that contained glass beads from old volcanic activity.

They also sampled rocks at the site of a huge landslide (Station 2 on the map below, past the Eiffel Tower and as far south-west as they got along the Seine on the map above). The landslide was caused by ejecta from the Tycho crater 2000 km (1300 miles) away. That is the same distance from Athens to Paris. The impact at Tycho sent ejecta out in all directions, forming rays. One of the rays extends as far as the Taurus-Littrow site where Apollo 17 landed.

Scientists (Arvidson et al) were able to age when Tycho was formed to about 100 million years ago using these samples. Here is their map of the landslide and where ejecta fell right at the landing site...

And now LRO shows clearly where that landslide was - the light material at the foot of the South Massif. And the Central Cluster of craters formed by impacts of ejecta from Tycho.

Compare that LRO view to the one Gene Cernan had coming in to land...!

Apollo 17 flew five mice called Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum and Phooey. The mice stayed on board the Command Module and didn’t get to land on the moon, but Ron Evans, the Command Module pilot, and those mice hold the record for the most orbits of the moon, having circled 75 times while Gene and Jack were pootling around Paris finding rock samples.

So, why did they park the LRV 150 meters away from the LM and walk the rest of the way? So that the camera on the LRV could film Challenger’s ascent stage taking off, and leaving the descent stage behind on the moon.

“We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” - Gene Cernan

Earthrise

Tue, 24 Dec 1968 18:19:43 -0500

Apollo 8. Christmas Eve, 1968. On the fourth orbit (out of 10) around the moon the CSM was in nose down position for Bill Anders to be photographing potential landing sites. Having just photographed lighted parts of the far side they were waiting to acquire signal with Houston as they came out from behind the moon. Earthrise was not something NASA had anticipated in spite of the photograph from Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966, and was not on Bill Anders' list of photos to be taken. But as the CSM rotated round, the rising earth came into view... Bill had black and white loaded in his Hasselblad and snapped quickly and then it disappeared from his view. All three of them, ex fighter/test pilots, were "totally enraptured" by the sight of their home planet. The next couple of minutes were surprisingly tense while they tried to find some colour film and capture the moment. There's a wonderful video reconstruction (and a transcript) on the link below with the actual comms of the moments surrounding the most iconic photograph ever taken.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dE-vOscpiNc

Bill Anders put it well when he said “Apollo 8 will be remembered 100 years from now for Earthrise. It is ironic that we went to explore the Moon and what we really discovered was the Earth.”

These photos are shown in correct orientation as seen orbiting the moon's

equator with north to the top. I have a copy of the colour photo signed by Jim Lovell hanging in my den.

"And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth," Frank Borman, Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast.

Not a Creature was Stirring

Wed, 21 Jun 1967 12:33:31 -0400

The mouse was reportedly conceived by Douglas Carl Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute during a conference lecture in 1961. He was exploring the interactions between humans and computers and came up with a design that used rolling wheels based on an area measuring device called a planimeter.

Doug Englebart (1925-2013)

He built the first prototype in 1963. It was carved in wood and had one button.

So, the mouse is as old as I am!

Doug Engelbart coined the nickname “mouse”, unsurprisingly, because the wire coming out the back was like a mouse’s tail. He also called the cursor on the screen a bug – but that was not widely adopted. Doug and his team at SRI also invented bit-mapped screens and hypertext, and he went on to work on the DARPA-funded ARPANET, the precursor of the internet.

The 1967 SRI patent application for the mouse describes it as a "X-Y position indicator for a display system", and it was granted in 1970.

Doug fell into obscurity in the computer world as early as 1970 because of his adherence to the notion of centralized, networked client-servers. The idea of decentralization was popular among younger researchers at a time when the possibility of the personal computer was barely on the horizon.

In 1979, when Xerox had built the Xerox Alto personal computer in their labs in Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, they used Engelbart’s idea to drive the cursor. Xerox’s mouse was smaller, and had three buttons, and used a ball bearing instead of wheels. Clicking an icon would open a menu that gave the available commands.

Steve Jobs bought himself a tour of Xerox PARC in 1979 (in a deal where Xerox paid a million dollars for 100,000 Apple shares, a year before the Apple IPO). Jobs was given a demo of the Xerox Alto working, he saw Larry Tesler sending e-mails on the Xerox Ethernet, he saw windows being used to switch between applications, and he saw an elegant word processor being used... all driven by the $300 Xerox version of the mouse.

Jobs went back to Apple and demanded that the Apple engineers create a machine with on screen menus, windows and a mouse to drive it.

Dean Hovey was contracted to create a simple mouse that cost no more than $15, and it had to have a single button. The problem Hovey found was that the friction inside the mouse was greater than the friction with the table top and so the mouse would skip. It was also very prone to the effects of dust. Hovey worked on the design of the mouse, creating a version where a plastic ball met very little friction inside the mouse.

Meanwhile, the Apple engineers worked on having the mouse interact directly with the windows on the screen, instead of just opening a menu. With the Apple, the mouse could be used to click and drag, to move or resize a window, much as we still do now. The result was the Apple Macintosh.

SRI licensed the mouse patent to Apple in the early 80’s for about $40,000. Doug never received any royalties for the invention.

Mustermark...?

Sat, 1 Feb 1964 09:50:31 -0500

Mustermark... where did that come from? The answer to that takes us down an unlikely rabbit hole of physics and literature...

When I was 10, in 1973, my dad bought an encyclopedia in several volumes. I must have read the last volume on science from cover to cover. The last part was on sub-atomic particles, ending with the theory of Quantum Chromo-Dynamics. QCD was proposed by physicist Murray Gell-Mann and in a short paper published in February 1964 he coined the term Quark for the first time. Incidentally, Gell-Mann was born in the same year as my dad, 1929.

Quantum Chromo-Dynamics… The name alone sends tingles down your spine, right? Not only are atoms (Greek meaning is indivisible!) made of protons and neutrons (which I already knew aged 10), but they in turn are made up of what Gell-Mann called quarks. Quarks are held together by gluons.

A 10-year-old’s imagination was on fire, with plans to become a particle physicist who would discover the first evidence of the existence of quarks.

But where did Gell-Mann get the word Quark from? A rather odd poem called Finnegan’s Wake by Irish poet James Joyce was a favorite of Gell-Mann. In the poem is the line “Three quarks for Mustermark.” And Gell-Mann coined the term quark for his new particles. Now, in the poem, Mustermark is a philanderer and all-round cad, and a quark was like a squawk or a telling-off, but I decided to adopt Mustermark anyway and registered the domain mustermark.com.

Quarks have different flavors:

Originally, Top and Bottom were proposed as Truth and Beauty; far more poetic... but not all physicists appreciate the poetic like Gell-Mann did, and Top and Bottom prevailed.

Alas, I discovered that my math was not good enough to go into the field of particle physics, but then, in 1978, a heartbroken teenager saw a TV show on BBC; a Royal Institute Christmas Lecture.

The Christmas Lectures were a wonderful series each year that presented science in a fascinating way... Eric Laithwaite in 1974 presenting ‘The Engineer Through the Looking-Glass’, Carl Sagan in 1977 with ‘The Planets’...

and then in 1978 Christopher Zeeman presented ‘Mathematics into Pictures’. On the show Sir Christopher had a huge model of DNA (like the one I now have) built from Molymods, and I decided then and there that I would find out how it worked.

And that’s how I ended up in biotech; the rest, as they say, is history.

Yours most geekily,
(Muster)Mark.

Radiophonic Workshop

Sat, 23 Nov 1963 09:16:43 -0500

Do you know the TV show “Dr. Who”? It first aired on BBC in Nov 1963. The Dr Who theme music was written in 1963 for piano/orchestra by Ron Grainer. A young woman called Delia Derbyshire in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was given the score and recorded the spacey version we know from 50+ years of the long-running BBC classic. She used early synthesizers and tape machines running backwards. When Ron Grainer heard it he asked “Did I write that?” and was so blown away that he asked the Performing Rights Society to add Delia to the writing credits. They refused!

One of my favorite EDM tracks is a version of this theme by Orbital - called “Doctor?” - they recreated what Delia had done, using modern synthesizers, and added a cool drum track. It was released in 2001, the year Delia died. Incredible that a piece of music from 1963 sounded as amazing as a dance track 40-something years later. Here is the original Dr Who theme and the album version by Orbital.

Original
https://youtu.be/75V4ClJZME4

Orbital
https://youtu.be/g-WFRNO13IY

Orbital is one of my favorite modern EDM bands. The Hartnoll brothers started out in 1989 after Paul put a demo track together in a spare 10 minutes (while waiting for a mate to go to the pub) and asked a DJ friend for feedback. It was released as “Chime”, one of their major dance anthems. They hit the big time in 1994 when they were the first real EDM act at the Glastonbury Festival, which was televised on UK’s Channel 4. Pretty amazing to knock up a track in a few minutes and still be playing it as your encore 30-odd years later.

But their track Doctor? is a great tribute to Delia and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Crap on the Moon

Mon, 14 Sep 1959 13:54:55 -0400

On September 14th, 1959, (UTC) Luna 2 crashed on the Moon impacting the surface at about 7,400 mph.

Before impact, the 390 kg probe detonated two pods that scattered pentagonal metal pieces engraved with “СССР СЕНТЯБРЬ 1959” ("USSR SEPTEMBER 1959"). The probe transmitted its last data showing its scintillation and Geiger counters had not detected radioactivity, and then hit the Moon about 0° West and 29° North.

It was the sixth attempt by the Russians to aim for the Moon (Luna 1 missed the moon by 3,725 miles). Luna 2 was the first artificial object ever to reach the Moon. Luna 2 was followed about 30 minutes later by 9 tonnes of the third stage of the Luna 2 Vostok rocket on what is assumed to be pretty much the same spot.

Thus began a long history of humans leaving crap on the Moon, literally... there are dozens of bags of human waste left behind by Apollo! All the weight they brought back was for moonrocks... no room for poop on the return trip.

The Apollo 11 landing site contains many items that will remain preserved as a Heritage Site...

1. Apollo 11 Lunar Module Descent Stage (1) 2. U.S. 3' x 5' Flag (1) 3. Laser Ranging Retroreflector (LRRR) (1) 4. Passive Seismic Experiment (PSE) (1) 5. Neil Armstrong's Apollo Portable Life Support System (PLSS), Model A7L (1) 6. Neil Armstrong's Apollo Space Boots, Model A7L (2) 7. Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin Jr.'s Apollo Portable Life Support System (PLSS), Model A7L (1) 8. Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin Jr.'s Apollo Space Boots, Model A7L (2) 9. Empty Food Bags (2+) 10. A Silicon Disc Carrying Statements from Presidents Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and from Leaders of 73 Other Nations. (1) 11. A Gold Replica of an Olive Branch, Traditional Symbol of Peace (1) 12. Mission Patch from Apollo I of Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee. (1) 13. Commemorative Plaque attached to the Lunar Module Descent Leg. "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." The plaque is signed by the Apollo 11 crew and President Richard M. Nixon. (1) 14. TV Camera (1) 15. Spring Scales (2) 16. Tongs (1) 17. Small Scoop (1) 18. Scongs (1) 19. Bulk Sample Scoop (1) 20. Trenching Tool (1) 21. Camera (Hasselblad El Data) (1) 22. Armrests (4) 23. Mesa Bracket (1) 24. Solar Wind Composition Staff (1) 25. Handle of Contingency Lunar Sample Return Container (1) 26. Medals Commemorating Two Dead Cosmonauts (2) 27. Document Sample Box Seal (1) 28. Storage container (empty) (1) 29. Hasselblad pack (1) 30. Film Magazines (2+) 31. Filter, Polarizing (1 ) 32. Remote Control Unit (PLSS) (2) 33. Defecation Collection Device (4) 34. Overshoes, Lunar (2) 35. Covers, Pga Gas Connector (2) 36. Kit, Electric waist, Tether (1) 37. Bag Assy, Lunar Equip.conveyor & waist tether (1) 38. Conveyor assy, Lunar Equipment (1) 39. Bag, Deployment, Life line (1) 40. Bag, Deployment, Lunar equipment conveyor (1) 41. Life line, Lt. wt. (1) 42. Tether, Waist, EVA (4) 43. Food Assembly, LM (4 man days) (1) 44. TV subsystem, Lunar (1) 45. Lens, TV wide angle (1) 46. Lens, TV lunar day (1) 47. Cable assembly, TV (100 ft.) (1) 48. Adapter, SRC/OPS (2) 49. Cannister, ECS LIOH (2) 50. Urine collection assembly, small (2) 51. Urine collection assembly, large (2) 52. Bag, Emesis (4) 53. Container assembly, Disposal (1) 54. Filter, oxygen bacterial (1) 55. Container, PLSS Condensate (1) 56. Antenna, S-Band (1) 57. Cable,S-Band antenna (1) 58. Bag, Lunar Equipment Transfer (1) 59. Pallet assembly #1 (1) 60. Central Station (1) 61. Pallet Assembly #2 (1) 62. Primary structure assembly (1) 63. Hammer (1) 64. Gnomon (Excludes mount) (1) 65. Tripod (1) 66. Handle/cable assembly (cord for TV camera) (1) 67. York mesh packing material (1) 68. SWC bag (extra) (1) 69. Core tube bits (2) 70. SRC seal protectors (2) 71. Environmental sample containers "O" rings (2+) 72. Apollo Lunar Surface Close-up Camera (1) 73. Lunar equipment conveyor (1) 74. ECS canister (1) 75. ESC bracket (1) 76. OPS brackets (2+) 77. Left hand side stowage compartment (1) 78. Footprint 79. Extension Handle 80. Stainless steel cover (9 x 7 5/8 inches x 1/16 inch thick) 81. Plastic covering for Flag 82. 8 foot aluminum tube 83. 2 + retaining pins for flag and staff storage 84. Insulating blanket 85. Small aluminum capsule

And there are many other items scattered about the other Apollo sites that are part of Heritage sites...
• 5 other American flags • 2 golf balls • 10 other pairs of boots • TV cameras • film magazines • 96 bags of urine, feces, and vomit • numerous Hasselbad cameras and accessories • several improvised javelins • various hammers, tongs, rakes, and shovels • backpacks • insulating blankets • utility towels • used wet wipes • personal hygiene kits • empty packages of space food • a photograph of Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke's family • a feather from Baggin, the Air Force Academy's mascot falcon, used to conduct Apollo 15's famous "hammer-feather drop" experiment • a small aluminum sculpture, a tribute to the American and Soviet fallen astronauts who died in the space race - left by the crew of Apollo 15 • a silver pin, left by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean • a medal honoring Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin

The discarded falcon feather lies among other trash; a relic from Dave Scott’s test of Galileo Galilei’s prediction that a hammer and a feather would fall at the same rate without air. “How ‘bout that? That proves Mr Galileo was correct in his findings... Superb!” https://youtu.be/oYEgdZ3iEKA

So, what of all that poop? Does it still contain any living bacteria? NASA apparently wants to find out if anything has survived the 50 years of UV irradiation and the boiling heat of all that unfiltered sunshine.

Being as the Apollo 13 Lunar Module was burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, the S-IVb third stage rocket is the only lunar artifact from Apollo 13; what’s left of it is pictured below:

Wikipedia has a jolly good list of everything that mankind has kindly left on the lunar surface...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_man-made_objects_on_the_Moon

Jeff Bezos’ expeditions in 2014 to recover Apollo first stage F1 engines from under the Atlantic Ocean make you think of salvaging what’s been abandoned on the Moon.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty and NASA’s 2011 “Recommendations” for private craft operating near Apollo sites
means that NASA can claim the landing sites are Heritage Sites.

An Apollo ascent stage is the part of the LM that takes the astronauts back to the command service module. The ascent stage is then tossed back to the lunar surface. NASA also claims the ascent stages are Heritage Sites, but the legality of that claim is dubious due to the fact that these were crashed onto the lunar surface, the ascent stages of Apollos 11 and 16 are actually lost; they have been abandoned and, so, sovereignty no longer applies.

If only we could get up there and salvage stuff. I would love a piece of the Apollo 16 ascent stage “Orion” if they ever figure out where it crashed.

We could also salvage the descent stage of Apollo 10 that was crashed onto the moon - that is the only descent stage outside of a Heritage Site that could be salvaged. Here’s Snoopy on its way down to about 47,000 feet of the lunar surface.

The legs were jettisoned to crash on the moon. The ascent stage of Apollo 10‘s “Snoopy” was fired off to orbit the Sun, and is still out there somewhere (possibly what is known as small Earth-crossing asteroid 2018 AV2). At least it’s not littering the Moon!

But now there is really is life on the Moon! On 11 April 2019, the Israeli lunar probe Beresheet crashed onto the moon carrying a payload including Tardigrades.

These poor little mites, also known as water bears, are about 0.5mm long, they are virtually indestructible and can survive being desiccated for years and years! Now there are hundreds of these little litter bugs on the lunar surface. The site was snapped by LRO a couple of weeks after the crash:

space.com published a nifty guide to the scrap dealer’s paradise that the Moon has become:

Thanks for this plagiarized blog entry go to space.com, Wikipedia, and my good friend Mrs. Nesbit.

Automatic Binding Bricks

Mon, 28 Jul 1958 13:26:27 -0400

Lego is, as of 2022, the world’s biggest toy company. The company was started in 1934, by Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund, Denmark. Lego first began with wooden toys.

Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891-1958)

Lego began making ‘Automatic Binding Bricks’ from plastic in 1947 after receiving samples of the Kiddicraft plastic self-locking bricks that had been invented by Hilary “Harry” Fisher Page.

The Kiddicraft original 1940s products:

The Lego patent for the modern ABS Lego brick (Lego as we know it) was filed on July 28, 1958, shortly after Christiansen’s death in March of that year, by his son, Godtfred. The patent was granted on October 24, 1961.

Lego has produced, as of 2022, an estimated 650-800 billion bricks!

Lego maintains that they asked permission from Kiddicraft in the late 1950s to make their own version of the bricks and say that Kiddicraft had no objection, but never established that legally. Lego finally bought the residual rights to the Kiddicraft patent in 1981, and in an out-of-court settlement, paid £45,000 to Kiddicraft.

There are 8 Lego amusement parks: Denmark, England, Germany, California, Florida, Malaysia, Dubai, and Japan

A Lego model of Trafalgar Square at Legoland in Windsor, England:

There is a life-size Lego Star Wars X-Wing fighter, which is a 23 ton, 5.3 million brick creation with a 44 feet wingspan!

The Lego motto from 1936 is still in use today: "only the best is good enough" (Danish: det bedste er ikke for godt, literally "the best isn't excessively good")