It took 9 years and 3 billion miles for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to finally capture this view.
The Hillary Mountains, towering mountains of water ice, rising up to 3,500 meters, on the edge of a huge frozen nitrogen plain called Sputnik Planitia.
Curiosity Rover’s damaged wheels after 13 years, or 7.25 Martian years of service on the Red Planet. All images taken in March 23, 2026.
The wheels have some slots cut into them, which serve a very important function by letting dirt and rocks that accumulate inside the open sided wheel a pathway to fall out. They also leave a very specific tred pattern so that the cameras can be used to check if a wheel is dragging or not. Some of the slots are elongated and some short. It was designed specifically to write out in Morse code:
.— / .–. / .-..
It spells out JPL! And like that, the Gale crater’s surface may be stamped with JPL’s name.
Illustration of a 1982 Perfect Writer. “The manual accompanying Perfect Writer came with a fanciful visual aid to illustrate the principle behind the scrolling mechanism, the better to reassure anxious users.” [Paris Review]
so a very long time ago, my dad worked with an arson investigator
this guy was often one of the first people on the scene following a suspected arson, once emergency services had done what they needed to do. at times, there were also civilians on the periphery. often, they were freaking out, and understandably so; their home or workplace had just, quite literally, gone up in smoke
this investigator wouldn’t try to calm them down. he wouldn’t comfort them or be a shoulder to cry on.
instead, he’d walk up to the person most visibly losing their shit, hand them a fire extinguisher, and say “hey, can you keep an eye out for any other fires, and if you see one, can you put it out with this?”
of course, there was no actual risk of another fire. he wouldn’t be on the scene investigating if there was even a chance that the fire wasn’t completely put out. but the bystander didn’t need to know that
because that person, without fail, would immediately pull it together, take the fire extinguisher, and stand guard. they were, at least temporarily, calm enough for this investigator to do this job
my dad has told me the parable of the fire extinguisher a hundred times, and i think about it a lot. i think about what it says about people and crises. i think about what it says about the grounding power of having a purpose. and i think about the importance of letting someone help me through something, even if that help is just going to be another casserole to throw into the freezer, because useless or not, that fire extinguisher might be the only thing holding them together
“We strike a balance of what we call a “grounded openness” that avoids the traps of provincialism (local museumification) or detached globalism that seeks to homogenize and make local specifics interchangeable.”
Eye idol ca. 3700–3500 BCE On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 202 This type of figurine known as an eye idol, made of stone and having incised eyes, has been excavated at Tell Brak, where thousands were found in a building now called the Eye Temple. They were probably dedicated there as offerings. Many are incised with multiple sets of eyes, others with jewelry, and still others with representations of “children"—smaller eyes and body carved on the body of the larger idol. Wide eyes demonstrate attentiveness to the gods in much of Mesopotamian art.
