The last week was especially busy because I attended the launch of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. I will have a lot to say about that launch, LADEE, and related topics later on, but suffice to say it was a great experience — increased because it was my first successful rocket launch viewing. (I attempted to watch the Antares rocket test in April, but that was scrubbed at the last minute and I couldn’t attend the rescheduled launch.) So, here’s my very small list of articles published this week.

• Turbulence ahead: Interstellar wind changes direction, blows faster (Ars Technica): The Solar System orbits the center of the Milky way, and as it does, it’s passing through a diffuse nebula known as the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC). Various satellites and probes have measured the passage of atoms through the Solar System since the 1970s; analysis of that data shows that the direction of this wind has changed and its rate has picked up. That reveals some interesting new detail about the environment surrounding the Solar System.
• Of maps and math and Buckminster Fuller (Galileo’s Pendulum): Mapmaking will never be perfect because there’s no way to create a flat representation of the curved surface of Earth without some distortions. This post goes a little into the math of projection, the art of converting positions on a globe onto a flat map, and how the eccentric utopian architect Buckminster Fuller tried to solve the problem. The result was his wonderful Dymaxion map, which as a physicist I’m very fond of.

I also wrote a brief viewing guide for the LADEE launch, which is now necessarily obsolete. However, you can find a lot of photos and video from the launch at NASA’s LADEE site.