We all heard the story and the famous photo of the intrepid frog that try to fly alongside a powerful rocket launch from NASA’s Wallops Island in Virginia. The agency was launching the LADEE mission to the moon atop a Minotaur V rocket.
“The photo team confirms the frog is real and was captured in a single frame by one of the remote cameras used to photograph the launch,” said NASA “The condition of the frog, however, is uncertain.”
NASA’s Wallops facility neighbors the Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge and so is Kennedy Space Center and surrounding Cape Canaveral. This morning, A CNBC reporter reported on Twitter that there was a brief blackout at the agency’s flagship facility in Florida and it was due to a frog’s interference.
“There was ‘a major power outage’ at Kennedy this morning, a source says, but power was just restored,” the reporter tweeted. The cause of the outage? “A frog tripped a transformer.” The image below accommodated a follow-up tweet.
“The challenges of a spaceport on a wildlife refuge,” tweeted Dr. Phil Metzger, a professor and NASA Planetary Scientist. “Other examples: a raccoon got into a Shuttle’s orbital maneuvering pod. Gators stalked around the workers’ buildings. Vultures swarmed over the rocket pad during the countdown. Woodpeckers damaged the Shuttle external tanks.”
