Pic #1 from Mars InSight & Some of My NASA Sh!t

While a lot of people are NASA fans, there's also a lot of people who do not believe that these probes and missions even exist... SOME people think no huemahn has ever even left our atmosphere.
Those kinds of people really, really piss me off, but their 'belief' now is so strong and true, that arguing with these folk is like arguing there's no 'god' with someone who believes in it.... Futile... I hope those people are left to rot on this planet when we leave for the stars. Harsh? Yes, but their level of stupidity is such they deserve whatever they'll get.

But this isn't time for anger... Count to 10.... One of the other 'cool' things about this 'mission' was that InSight wasn't traveling alone. Launched just behind it were two 'cubesats' the size of about a cereal box to a briefcase. These' mini-statellites were a World first in 'deep space', as they followed InSight to Mars and helped out by sending the 'A-Ok' signal back to Earth.

Now, in a few more hours the solar arrays will deploy, then they will begin to system check all of the science instruments. The 'cover' will be removed from the cameras and they will inspect there area around InSight to see where is best to get this science mission going... This will take weeks to months before the full mission is up and swinging.

Here's the first image:

My first reaction was, 'YAGGH Space ants!!!!'

One of my favorite things about these 'Space Naysayers' is they are always going, "There's no real photo's from space", "They are all Photoshopped", "All the photo's are fake!"....

Ok tough people's...Here's a link you can  go to anytime, they post RAW images from the mission.

RAW images are the end all to all arguments about 'photo's and space'... These photos are untouched copies of the originals sent from whatever mission they belong to. NO one has touched these images and NASA is more than happy that anyone is looking at them. Even civilians 'touch up' photos on their own and some for NASA.

RAW Photo's from the InSight Missions: 

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/multimedia/raw-images/?order=sol+desc%2Cdate_taken+desc&per_page=50&page=0&mission=insight

So I had on my NASA JPL cap. I'm a bit of a NASA geek. Here's a peek at my collection...

My NASA Kennedy Space Center 'Metalion' hat. With the frosted NASA Mug (comes in a set of two) and a NASA patch.

NASA 'Gateway to the Future' sweater with a scale model of the space shuttle 'Discovery'.

I had always wanted to see a shuttle blast off, but never made it to Florida before they axed the shuttle program. Most of the launches to the ISS are done in Russia and any unmanned missions are done in California or Florida.. So maybe someday I'll see some astronauts lift off from the US, as they've just put out their 'deadline' for June 2019, and that's when we'll (The Canadian Space Agency too uses the Russian Soyuz) see the US back in control of it's ferrying astronauts and cargo back and forth from the ISS (Until it's put out of commission)..

So much more exciting missions to come, lots of science to come from Mars... NASA's 'New Horizons' is soon to meet up with an asteroid in the Kuiper belt (the first time this has ever been attempted) and New Horizon's finished it's primary mission, so they thought since it was doing just fine, they'd throw it another!

It'll be flying past