Happy Birthday Amelia Earhart!

Amelia Earhart is honored by Google with a birthday Doodle.

One of the world’s most famous pilots, Amelia Earhart was one of the first female pilots who sought to break endurance records and prove women pilots were just as tough and capable as the men. In 1937 she took off from Papua New Guinea in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe by following the equator.  She disappeared then, and her body was never recovered. However, she was still an important figure in aviation, perhaps more so than any living pilot might have been. And now, Amelia Earhart has found herself on a Google Doodle.

Earhart was born July 24, 1897, in Kansas, but didn’t take her first flight until 1920 in Long Beach, California. Earhart was instantly smitten with flight and dedicated herself to her new career; within two years, she was breaking aviation records and by 1927, she flew across the Atlantic.

The Google Doodle shows Earhart climbing into a Lockheed Vega 5b, the plane that made her famous. She joins artistsauthorsmusicians, and scientists in the pantheon of people who have gotten their own Google tributes.

Mickey Mouse Discovered on Mercury!

Mickey Mercury or Mercury Mouse?

The space probe Messenger has traveled far closer to the sun without being destroyed than most satellites probably could.  Its purpose is to study one of the strangest planets in the solar system, the Sun’s closest neighbor Mercury.  Part planet and part comet, Mercury has been a fascinating study for NASA scientists, and Messenger has managed to take over 100,000 images of the strange planet, but no image is stranger than this.  NASA’s Messenger satellite has captured an image of Mickey Mouse on the surface of Mercury.

NASA calls the shape an ”accumulation of craters over Mercury’s long geologic history,” but I think we all know differently.  Messenger is the first spacecraft to ever orbit the planet closest to the sun, and it had to specially designed to maintain its position on Mercury given the planet’s slow rotation status and the incredible amount of heat the satellite has to endure being so close to the sun.