Finding ways to keep busy in lockdown hasn’t been easy. Many people ran out of things to do after the first few weeks, particularly those living in a nursing home. Fortunately, one group of elderly residents has found an excellent way to keep themselves entertained, and that’s by recreating famous album covers.

Lifting Their Spirits

The idea to redo these covers came from Robert Speker, the activities director at Sydmar Lodge Care in Edgware. It’s his job to keep the residents happy and engaged, something that’s been difficult in the current crisis. With everyone isolated from their loved ones, he wanted to try and lift their spirits. That was when he realized that his photography skills could come in handy, so he brought his camera into work and got creative.

A Fun Little Project

Speker is apparently known in his community for doing things “outside of the box,” so when he suggested recreating album covers, it didn’t seem that crazy. A lot of the covers he chose were relatively easy to recreate, such as Adele’s ‘21’ and Taylor Swift’s ‘1989.’ He also added a personal touch to the images by swapping the names of the artist with the nursing home resident in the photo. It was a fun little project that not only got the senior citizens involved but also attracted a lot of publicity.

Viral Sensation

The album cover recreations went viral after Speker uploaded the pictures to his Twitter account. People were quick to like his posts and wanted to see the images made into a calendar. That would certainly make for quite the Christmas gift, and it would also help the nursing home’s money-raising efforts too. A GoFundMe was recently established by Speker to help support charities aimed towards Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Given how much people loved this photo project, we have to wonder if Sydmar Lodge, or maybe other nursing homes, will do more of them.

A helicopter called Ingenuity recently took flight on Mars. NASA sent the autonomous helicopter to Mars with the Perseverance rover. It hovered above the Red Planet’s surface for about forty seconds, marking the first flight a spacecraft took on another planet. NASA’s helicopter took off into the thin Martian air on April 19 after it spun its carbon fiber rotor blades and rose about three meters above the ground.

Ingenuity Pivoted to Take a Look at NASA’s Perseverance Rover and Take a Picture

Soon after taking a picture of NASA’s perseverance, the helicopter settled back down. According to Ingenuity project Manager MiMi Aung, the helicopter acted just like it did when it was tested on Earth. Once the data stream from Ingenuity confirmed that it had performed its first flight, the team erupted in cheers. While the flight was originally scheduled for April 11, it was delayed to update the software of the helicopter after a test of the rotor blades showed problems switching from preflight to flight mode. After the reboot, a high-speed spin test on April 16 suggested the shift was likely to work, setting the stage for the April 19 flight.

According to NASA, Ingenuity’s First Flight Was Just a Test of the Technology

Ingenuity’s first mission is just a test flight, so it will not do any science during its course. It will last some 30 Martian days and prove definitively that powered flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere is possible. The plan for future aerial vehicles on Mars is to have them help rovers and human astronauts scout safe paths through the unfamiliar landscapes. Such vehicles can also get to tricky terrain that is out-of-reach for a rover.

Ingenuity’s flight was the pinnacle of over seven years of building, imagining, testing, and hoping for the team at NASA. Aung’s team started testing early prototypes of a Mars helicopter in 2014 without knowing if flying on Mars would even be possible. According to Aung, flight on Mars is challenging for many different reasons. Even though the planet’s gravity is just one-third of Earth’s, the density of the air is a mere one percent of that on Earth.