The Gad About Town

“Mission complete, Houston, After serving the world for over 30 years, the shuttle has earned its place in history, and it has come to a final stop.” —Space Shuttle Atlantis Commander Chris Ferguson

After a thirteen-day mission, Space Shuttle orbiter Atlantis glided to a landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida five years ago today. It was the final landing in the three-decade-long Space Shuttle program’s history, and it was a beautiful night landing (photo above).

The four-person crew visited the International Space Station, which had become, after the Columbia re-entry disaster in 2003, the only mission any of the space shuttles were allowed to participate in: a mission to a destination in space where the shuttle could be inspected for launch debris damage.
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A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, but they were larger than snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.
 
There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came on across the sky faster than wind. …
 
Plunk! Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen.Then huge brown grasshoppers were hitting the ground all around her, hitting her head and her face and her arms. They came thudding down like hail.
 
The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
 
Laura tried to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes, turning their heads this way and that. Mary ran screaming into the house. Grasshoppers covered the ground, there was not one bare bit to step on. Laura had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed squirming and slimy under her feet.—Laura Ingalls Wilder

The largest recorded swarm of locusts descended on the Midwest on this date in 1875. It was the Rocky Mountain locust (above), a form of grasshopper, and the cloud, an unending stream of locusts searching for food in the midst of a western drought, was larger than California: 1800 miles long and 110 miles wide, and it stretched from southern Canada to north Texas.
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