Flying saucers from Mars is the stuff of science fiction. But a flying saucer from Earth is part of the mission to get astronauts to the Martian surface.
NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory completed a successful spin test of a saucer-shaped experimental craft in front of a live web audience Tuesday. The saucer will next lift off by balloon from Hawaii, where from 120,000 feet it will be dropped to test a new kind of parachute and an inflatable Kevlar ring to add drag for a slower descent.
There are millions of asteroids in the Solar System and relatively few astronomers to track them. They’d hate to miss that one dangerous rogue headed on a collision course with Earth.
So NASA has made it easier for the amateur stargazer to record and compare their discoveries and put extra eyes on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
NASA and Planetary Resources Inc. have developed a computer program that is based on an algorithm that analyzes images for potential asteroids. The new asteroid hunting application, available for free download here, was announced Sunday by NASA at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas.
Leonard Nimoy’s portrayal of unflappable calm and logic during dangerous space travels on TV and in movies inspired those whose stage is actual space.
NASA is mourning the loss of Nimoy as if Mr. Spock was one of their own. Since news of Nimoy’s passing Friday, astronauts have tweeted, uploaded a YouTube video tribute and issued statements, thanking the iconic Star Trek actor for the courage to “boldly go” into professions involving space exploration.
One of the more touching tributes came from astronaut Terry Virts, who tweeted a photo of his hand in Spock’s iconic “Live Long and Prosper” gesture at a window in the International Space Station looking over Earth.
Wardrobe malfunctions can happen with every style of clothing. It’s just a little terrifying when it happens to an astronaut on a spacewalk.
NASA astronaut Terry Virts reported a floating blob of water inside his helmet Wednesday after completing a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to perform cable and lube work outside the International Space Station.
When you’ve designed some of the most successful consumer electronics in modern history, where else can you look but up?
One of the many interesting tidbits in The New Yorker’s 17,000-word profile of Jony Ive surrounds his fascination with the Apollo space program and, yes, designing spacesuits. It doesn’t sound like the spacesuit itself was what inspired Apple’s top designer as much as the process that went into it.
Ive mentions he’s been watching the old Discovery channel series Moon Machine about the challenges facing the Apollo program. NASA designers had no idea what goals they even needed to meet for the suit, but built up to the final design with invention after invention until they got it right.
An anecdote from The New Yorker’s time in Ive’s hallowed design studio (emphasis added):
Neil Armstrong had just been the first man to walk on the moon but now had to put out the trash.
It was a critical step home. Precise weight had to be calculated for re-entry and to make way for moon rocks, miscellaneous space travel items had to be discarded in the lunar module.
Just before sending the Eagle crashing into the surface of the moon, Mission Control records Armstrong’s voice saying nothing historic, certainly not as memorable as “One Small Step for Man…”
“You know, that – that one’s just a bunch of trash that we want to take back . . . We’ll have to figure something out for it.”
This audio proved to be an important piece of provenance when the wife of the late astronaut discovered a white bag in a home closet.
The dwarf planet named after the Roman goddess of motherly relationships will soon have a new friend. And scientists and space-exploration geeks here on Earth can’t wait for that friend, the space probe Dawn, to start dishing.
Dawn, launched in 2007 to visit two bodies within the asteroid belt past Mars, is scheduled to enter an orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres on March 6. Ceres is the largest mass in the asteroid belt and has an icy mantle that may harbor an internal ocean of water under its surface. Talk of water on a planetary body always leads to questions of life.
Ceres has long been a curiosity to astronomers and space observers, and its status — is it an asteroid? a dwarf planet? — has been hotly debated ever since its discovery in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi.
Never mind all that. What’s that white spot?
The exoplanet known as Kepler-16b is a gas giant near the outer limits of the habitable zone, but why should that discourage you from paying it a visit?
NASA has issued a set of three retro space-tourism posters to celebrate the discoveries of the Kepler Space Telescope, which has laid eyes on more than 1,000 confirmed exoplanets and more than 400 stellar systems.
If 16b — which is said to have a temperature similar to dry ice — doesn’t sound appealing, honeymooners might be drawn to the promise of romance with a double sunset. Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars, like Luke Skywalker’s native planet Tatooine, and the travel poster serves up this selling point: “Where Your Shadow Always Has Company.”
The muse of the Hubble Space Telescope is even more alluring 20 years later.
Of all the breath-taking photos from the telescope’s camera, the blooming pillars of gas of the Eagle Nebula from 1995 became Hubble’s most iconic image, depicted on stamps, tee-shirts and in several cameos for film and television.
Hubble recently took another look at the star-lit towers of gas and cosmic dust – dubbed the Pillars of Creation — with a newer camera (installed in 2009) and captured greater detail that should give astronomers a chance to see how the clouds of oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur have changed since the first photograph.
Flatworms are the darlings of the molecular biology field. What scientist doesn’t love a species that can lose an organ or body part — even its head — and grow it back?
It’s quite a trick. We’ll see if they can do it in space.
About 150 planarian flatworms, creatures that are happiest living in rivers or under a log, have first-class tickets aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship, which will take them to the International Space Station for an experiment that could unlock the key to human immortality.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make a music video, and maybe you shouldn’t be. Turns out, rocket scientists can’t dance.
NASA released a parody video on YouTube Thursday called “All About That Space,” designed to raise excitement about Orion’s recent first test flight.
The lyrics of Meghan Trainor’s monster hit “All About That Bass” were re-engineered by the Pathways Interns of NASA’s Johnson Space Center to lead the viewer on a behind-the-scenes look at the men and woman hard at work on space travel.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft is the most futuristic spacecraft to ever be built, but the tech inside it is shockingly old school, like the onboard computer powering the entire mission, that’s basically only powerful as an 11 year old G3 iBook.
On Earth scientists are all about pursuing the bleeding edge of tech, but in space the number one concern is reliability. Thanks to the higher amounts of radiation astronauts will travel through on the way to Mars, NASA’s engineers have to use a system that’s been tried and test. So to power their computer they’re are using an IBM PowerPC 750FX, that debuted in 2002 and isn’t even as powerful as an iPhone 6.
When the final Space Shuttle flight landed in July 2011, there was a sadness that America’s future involvement in space exploration would be nothing more than one of our astronauts occasionally hitching a lift on a rickety Russian rocket.
But NASA, partnered with various aerospace companies, has been quietly designing and building a new program that could eventually take humans into deep space.
While we wait for Amazon to figure out how to drone-deliver our next order of energy drinks or iPhone cases, NASA has been busy coming up with a way to make sure when a quadcopter crash-lands somewhere there will no need to panic about the environmental impact.
That’s because they have made a drone from fungus.
NASA’s unmanned Antares rocket exploded at launch above Wallops Island, Virginia, yesterday on route to dropping off supplies at the International Space Station.
A lesser casualty of that explosion? One rocket watcher’s iPad, which was blown to smithereens by the explosion.
But don’t worry. Cupertino did the right thing: They replaced it.
Is there anything cooler than images of our solar system? Especially ones of the actual Sol, or, our sun. No, there is not.
This fantastically seasonal Halloween image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which does nothing but stare at the sun all day and night in complete disregard of what its mother told it not to do.
Regardless, this image is amazing.
“The active regions in this image appear brighter,” writes NASA on its website, “because those are areas that emit more light and energy. They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.”
This image blends the images taken with two different ultraviolet wavelengths highlighted, one at 171 and the other at 193 Ångströms, to create this one-of-a-kind jack-o’-lantern sun.
Whatever — this thing is just creepy cool and I want a giant poster of it.
Source: NASA
We know clothing isn’t our niche but geeks still need to look good…right?
If your goal is to become the biggest rock star the galaxy has ever seen, then pay homage to the original guitar “Solo”-ist with this galactic t-shirt courtesy of Cult of Mac Deals at a price that also rocks: $15.99.
Wireless interference from an iPhone has been blamed for disrupting the compasses on a regional airliner and sending pilots several miles off course. The incident happened on a 2011 flight as it climbed past 9,000 feet, but the issue was resolved when a flight attendant asked a passenger to turn their iPhone off.
As the web becomes a place where more and more people spend their time reading, learning, and earning, learning to code for the web is a skill that is gaining traction with the masses. No longer is the idea of coding for the web considered an arduous thing to learn. Not only that, but the means that we are able to learn on the Internet give us even more options to build skill sets in areas we never though accessible – or even possible with our busy lives – before.
This Cult of Mac Deals offer provides you with one such option – and at a tremendous savings!
There’s a lot of things you have to keep track of in outer space. How much oxygen you have. Whether cosmic rays are irradiating your fellow crewmen. Which of your fellow astronauts are possible Russian saboteurs. How much murderous sentience your onboard space computer is exhibiting. And, of course, whether or not you are maintaining a balanced diet.
Right now, there’s not an app for that, believe it or not… but NASA and TopCoder, a program competition company, are working on that. And they need your help.
No matter which presidential candidate you’re voting for, today is a day to be proud for America. As Americans across the country come together to decide the direction of the country, we should relish the freedom we have to vote and elect a new president every four years. Democracy is one of the greatest aspects of the good ‘ole U.S.A.
Politics surrounding elections are always crazy, so we think the best way to celebrate Election Day is a bunch of wallpapers showing famous American presidents and historical figures doing crazy things as they fight for America’s freedom (literally). Check ’em out. Download them to your iPad or iPhone, and get out and vote.
Kicking off this week’s must-have apps roundup is a new music app called MUSaIC, that promises to help you rediscover your all those albums you forgot you had. We’ve also got a great new photography app called Etchings, which turns your photos into etched illustrations; a big update to Dolphin, one of my favorite third-party browsers on iOS; and more.
Guys. Gals. We totally just landed on Mars. Again! Ok, that news is almost two weeks old, but my chest is still pumping with adrenaline after watching those NASA nerd geniuses dominate the red surface with their radioactive robot.
Images of space always make the best wallpapers, and your Mac deserves something better than the default space wallpaper Apple provides in OS X. Here are 10 breathtaking retina wallpaper alternatives that will launch your Mac into space.
Here’s an interesting little factoid for you. The Curiosity rover — which landed last night on Mars, remote controlled by a team of NASA scientists armed with MacBook Pros — runs on a RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer.
This computer, in turn, is based on the IBM PowerPC 750 CPU, which Intel first introduce on November 10, 1997. This CPU was used by Apple in many computers in the late 1990s, including the original iMac.
As one insightful redditor notes: “Curiosity is essentially a 2-CPU Power Macintosh G3 with some nifty peripherals and one HELL of a UPS.”
Source: Reddit
Did you hear that we touched down on Mars? Again. Late last night NASA’s rover Curiosity successfully carried out a very challenging landing on Mars so that it can explore the red planet and send data back to Earth.
How’d it get there? First there was a bunch of rocket science stuff that we don’t really understand, but the landing sequence was guided and watched by a bunch of NASA brainiacs on their MacBooks Pros. Who says hipsters are the only ones that use a Mac?
Here’s another picture of the NASA MacBook setup: