To whet our appetites for the extraordinary experience that will be the revelation of first the James Webb photos on July 12th, NASA has released a lovely photo of the Gale Crater on Mars. Here’e more from Astronomy Now:
This panorama was taken by the rover’s MastCam – from a ‘clay-bearing unit’ on the flank of Mount Sharp. The mountain’s mineralogy was heavily influenced by running water billions of years ago, when Gale crater was a lake, and the clay-rich material is a product of that water. Curiosity is now heading further up the slopes of the mountain, to a ‘sulphate-bearing unit’, which it will hopefully have reached by the time that you read this.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.