Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

Have a Happy Thought:     Many of us (I’m assuming – I definitely did) wanted to be a fossil-hunter (or maybe just fossil-finder) at some point in our lives. Why are fossils important? Well, other than being really cool to find, and other than the fact that they stick to your tongue when you lick them… they give us a sense of history, a way to understand how the current plants and animals we share the earth with came to be. In other words, fossils are “the whakapapa of our celebrated flora and fauna.” 1   If you live in the US, you can get these amazing books “Roadside Geology of…” that help you “interpret the rocks and landscapes visible outside your car window… [and will] guide you to outcrops and roadcuts where you can stretch your legs and expand your minds.”   Some of this geology information is very useful to fossil-hunters, who want to know where to look for rock layers of a certain age. https://mountain-press.com/collections/roadside-geology/pro...

Have a Happy Thought:   Just over one year ago, I shared with you the beginning of a simulated mission to Mars – the CHAPEA mission. It’s run by NASA, so you know this is an acronym – it stands for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog. https://cymittw.blogspot.com/2023/06/happy-thought-for-30-june-2023.html     Mission patch for Chapea-1 https://www.nasa.gov/chapea/mission1 with the mission motto Ad Martus A Domo and the participants' names Selariu, Haston, Jones and Brockwell.   Largely, this mission was to understand the physical and psychological tolls on potential astronauts on a mission to Mars, and also to explore some of the technology that could keep those astronauts alive, fed, and happy. Well, after 378 days, their mission is complete and the four crew members have ‘returned to Earth’. The scientists, participants, and many other supporters learned a lot from this mission, and there are even two more follow-up missions planned. The n...

Have a Happy Thought:   We live in an incredible time – a time in which humans are sending robots to literal other worlds, and bringing back pieces of those worlds to study, back here on Earth.   This has happened twice now in short succession! Just last week , a Chinese-led mission returned samples of the “far side” of the moon back to Earth. This was the Chang-e 6 mission. A couple of things of note about this mission:   The mission name, Chang'e ( 嫦娥 ), is an ancient Chinese goddess or mythological figure, who lives in/on the moon with her pet rabbit, which can easily be seen from Earth, in the light and shadows formed by the highlands and craters visible from Earth. Image: the moon as seen through a telescope. Vaughan Turner, supplied. While there is no Dark Side of the Moon, there is a Far Side of the Moon: The same ‘face’ of the moon always faces the Earth, so different parts of the moon are lit by the sun as the...