midnights

1) Your life’s worth and the value of true success are dependent on the relationships you’ve built throughout your lifetime. That and that alone matters.  

2) Your life’s work must be a window for you to influence people. Do what you love for the things and people that you love. If all of us do just that then fuck, all of us are geniuses and visionaries of our time. Not exaggerating. I swear on my life that even Neil deGrasse Tyson and Neil Gaiman would concur to that statement. 

3) Nobody fucking cares how cool you are, how smart you are, how talented you are and whatever the fuck it is that you’re so proud of. I cannot stress enough that what people will care about is how you treat them. You can wear your achievements like a badge but I swear to god that none of those will give you fullfilment and a lasting image of self worth. You can be exceedingly great at what you do but still feel like shit at the end of the day. 

4) The kind of happiness that lasts is the kind of happiness that is shared.

5) People are miserable because of how much they struggle to expand their live’s breadth. Contentment and happiness are found in expanding life’s depth. The truth is that there is much to be gained in having so little. 

6) Love is a choice. Its a commitment and a whole lot of hard work. Love is never just a feeling because if feelings are all there is to it then I can assure you that that is not love.

7) Where you are right now is exactly where you are supposed to be. The reason why you are where you are is because you’re meant to learn something from it. Here’s the thing: you’re not moving forward unless you learn whatever it is that you’re supposed to learn. Thats just how life works honey. Life is a constant learning process and you always have to learn if you ever wish to move forward.

8) Life is round and the hardest lessons that life will ever teach you are the lessons that you will have to keep learning again and again. Swallow these words. Swallow them on your best days and swallow them even more on your worst days. Actually just swallow them everyday. These words are nothing more than just words until they are lived. 

 and on a much more personal note:

Pew. Pew. Lasers in space!

Iconic movie franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek feature futuristic laser technologies, but space lasers aren’t limited to the realm of science fiction. In fact, laser communications technologies are changing the way missions transmit their data. The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) blasts into space this weekend, demonstrating the unique – and totally awesome – capabilities of laser communications systems.

Currently, NASA missions rely on radio frequency to send data to Earth. While radio has served the agency well since the earliest days of spaceflight, there are significant benefits to laser systems. Just as the internet has gone from dial-up to high-speed connections, lasers communications’ higher frequency allows missions to send much more information per second than radio systems. With laser communications, it would only take nine days to transmit a complete map of Mars back to Earth, compared to nine weeks with radio frequency systems.

LCRD will demonstrate these enhanced capabilities from 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface. And although the mission uses lasers, these lasers are not visible to the human eye. Once in orbit, the mission will perform experiments using two telescopes on Earth that will relay data through the spacecraft from one site to the other over an optical communications link. These experiments will help NASA and the aerospace community understand the operational challenges of using lasers to communicate to and from space.

On Earth, there are ground stations telescopes that will capture LCRD’s laser signal and send the data to the mission operations center in New Mexico. The two ground stations are located on Haleakalā, Hawaii and Table Mountain, California. These picturesque locations weren’t chosen because they’re beautiful, but rather for their mostly clear skies. Clouds – and other atmospheric disturbances – can disrupt laser signals. However, when those locations do get cloudy, we’ve developed corrective technologies to ensure we receive and successfully decode signals from LCRD.

This demonstration will help NASA, researchers, and space companies learn more about potential future applications for laser communications technologies. In the next few years, NASA will launch additional laser missions to the Moon on Artemis II and to the asteroid belt, even deeper into space. These missions will give us insight on the use of laser communications further in space than ever before.

Ultimately, laser systems will allow us to glean more information from space. This means more galaxy pics, videos of deep space phenomena, and live, 4K videos from astronauts living and working in space.

Laser communications = more data in less time = more discoveries.

If laser communications interests you, check out our Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Internship Project. This program provides high school, undergrad, graduate, and even Ph.D. candidates with internship opportunities in space communications areas – like laser comm.