Geospatial Gif Party: Now with NASA LEGO

I like visiting the blog, i09: We come from THE FUTURE,  for my daily dose of fun science and science fiction news. This headline, “Here’s the first look at Lego’s official Curiosity Rover Model” is how I found out about the cool Lego model created by an actual NASA Mechanical Engineer who worked on parts for the Curiosity Rover. It’s suitably accurate enough to use in any classroom because space engineers are serious about accuracy  for spacecraft and LEGO spacecraft. What caught my eye was a reply post that started, “Hey, I work with the New Horizons team (Pluto 2015!), and we’re pretty jealous of the Curiosity and Hayabusa sets, so we asked one of our Lego-obsessed scientist friends to make a model of the New Horizons Spacecraft for us and submit it to Cuusoo too!” and asks readers to register at and support their LEGO New Horizons Model. Within that comment section were more discussions about the accuracy of the LEGO model and its remote sensing technology like, “The star trackers need to be a piece, or pair of pieces, with the telescopes pointing at 90 degrees relative to each other”.  It’s this attention to scientific accuracy and detail that makes i09 a fun site to visit. 

Which is why I was glad to find out that their Friday Gif Party this week said, “We’re having a Gif Party! For Science“. The community editor and science writer, Ria Misra, asked readers to post “the most amazing gifs from chemistry, tech, physics, biology, cartography, anatomy, or space — like this gorgeous gif here, which stitches together a full day’s worth of images from Russia’s Elektro-L meteorological satellite during the autumnal equinox” It was great to see images of remote sensing, 3D modeling, weather mapping, and cartography, even if the words GIS, geography, remote-sensing or geospatial were never used directly by name. I agree with the guy who posted a gif of the Mars rover labeled “Follow your Curiosity” and added – “My favorite geologist”.  Time to post the John Snow meme Frank created and start giving the geosciences some love.