At 9:56 AM Eastern Standard Time on Friday, May 25th, SpaceX’s Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station.
Compared to Jupiter’s moon Europa, our planet is practically a desert, as this NASA image shows. It’s a computer visualization showing Europa and a dried-out Earth, with the volume of all their water represented by blue spheres.
(Details at APOD: 2012 May 24 - All the Water on Europa)
May 24th
12:35 PM
12:35 PM
Neil Armstrong comments on the final landing sequence. View from the Eagle in 1969 on the left and a Google lunar map on the right - from a video recreation.
A glitch had put the Apollo 11 lunar module in a higher altitude than anticipated on approach. Dangerously low on fuel, Armstrong takes manual control in order to avoid massive boulders, and finds a good spot with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining. Though reclusive and rarely interviewed, the right stuff gives a rare account to - well - Australian accountants.
Above is an image of the constellation Orion, which is also the home to a ferocious red giant known as Betelgeuse. It is clearly visible as a bright point of fiery orange light. By analyzing its brightness, astrophysicists have uncovered that it’s extremely unstable and has dimmed by 15% in the past decade. At about ten million years old, It is a relatively young star but has sped through its life cycle as a result of its extraordinary mass.
At this very moment, there are hundreds of telescopes from around the world trained on this relatively nearby star, following its every move. This is because Betelgeuse is about to explode any time soon. And by “any time soon”, I mean it could burst into a fiery supernova either tomorrow or in a million years. Although we are quite uncertain about when exactly it will burst apart, we do know that when it does go, it will provide us with a spectacular stellar show. With the red giant being a mere 500 light years away, the explosion will be so incredibly bright that it may shine as bright as a full moon at night and fill the sky as a miniature second sun. Or maybe it has exploded as i write this blog-post but the light simply hasn’t reach us yet.
In a blink of an eye, Betelgeuse will release more energy that our sun has or ever will produce in its lifetime and if we’re lucky enough, we’ll get to witness it with our own eyes.
May 7th
6:09 PM
6:09 PM
"I’m convinced that 2001 is really a movie about getting something good to eat. Monolith appears to apes: Apes get tasty meat. All the humans in space? They’re eating processed crap (even the restaurant on the orbital is a “Howard Johnson’s”) Then Dave goes through the monolith. Just before he evolves into space baby, he’s shown eating a real, prepared meal, with knife and fork.
The monolith creators are just interested in making sure we eat well"
The monolith creators are just interested in making sure we eat well"
The View From Freedom 7 - First American in Space
Photos from the Mercury-Redstone suborbital rocket launch on May 5, 1961 that took Alan B. Shepard, Jr. into space aboard Freedom 7. The photos, taken by a film camera mounted to the capsule, were compiled into a video by Arizona State University.
Mars-Bound Rover in Home Stretch of Red Planet Voyage
NASA’s newest Mars rover is entering the final leg of its space cruise, with just over three months remaining until it touches down on the Red Planet.
The huge Curiosity rover launched in November and is slated to land at Mars’ Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5. Curiosity’s mission team is working hard to prepare for the impending arrival, practicing the rover’s unconventional landing and mapping out just what it will do on the Red Planet’s surface.
Mating the Dragon capsule to the Falcon 9 rocket
In a processing facility at Space Launch Complex-40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, preparations are under way to mate the SpaceX Dragon capsule to the second stage of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.
The launch will be the company’s second demonstration test flight for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program (COTS). During the flight, the capsule will conduct a series of check-out procedures to test and prove its systems, including rendezvous and berthing with the International Space Station.
If the capsule performs as planned, the NanoRacks-CubeLabs Module-9 experiments and other cargo aboard Dragon will be transferred to the station. The cargo includes food, water and provisions for the station’s Expedition crews, such as clothing, batteries and computer equipment.
Under COTS, NASA has partnered with two private companies to provide resupply missions to the station. The launch is scheduled for 9:38 a.m. EDT on May 7.
Mimas drifts along in its orbit against the azure backdrop of Saturn’s northern latitudes in this true color view. (via NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
March 20th
2:49 PM
2:49 PM
I remember Christmas Eve with Apollo 8, being upset that Apollo 10 would not land, and seeing grainy images of a giant leap. And this… this makes me swallow hard with watering eyes.
“I will not accept a statement that says we can’t afford it”
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
Petition the White House to at least double NASA’s budget to one penny for every government dollar spent
March 6th
7:31 AM
7:31 AM
Study supports theory of extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago
A 16-member international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, has identified a nearly 13,000-year-old layer of thin, dark sediment buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico. The sediment layer contains an exotic assemblage of materials, including nanodiamonds, impact spherules, and more, which, according to the researchers, are the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.
These new data are the latest to strongly support of a controversial hypothesis proposing that a major cosmic impact with Earth occurred 12,900 years ago at the onset of an unusual cold climatic period called the Younger Dryas. The researchers’ findings appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The data suggest that a comet or asteroid –– likely a large, previously fragmented body, greater than several hundred meters in diameter –– entered the atmosphere at a relatively shallow angle. The heat at impact burned biomass, melted surface rocks, and caused major environmental disruption. “These results are consistent with earlier reported discoveries throughout North America of abrupt ecosystem change, megafaunal extinction, and human cultural change and population reduction,” Kennett explained. >continue<
Disappearance of the Clovis | Did a comet trigger a mini Ice Age?
March 5th
2:13 PM
2:13 PM
Asteroid 2012 DA14 pegged for potential Earth impact in Feb 2013
The asteroid, known as DA14, will pass by our planet in February 2013 at a distance of under 27,000 km (16,700 miles). This is closer than the geosynchronous orbit of some satellites.
There is a possibility the asteroid will collide with Earth, but further calculation is required to estimate the potential threat and work out how to avert possible disaster, NASA expert Dr. David Dunham told students at Moscow’s University of Electronics and Mathematics.
…if the entire asteroid [60-meter] is to crash into the planet, the impact will be as hard as in the Tunguska blast, which in 1908 knocked down trees over a total area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles) in Siberia. This is almost the size of Luxembourg. >continue<
Project Icarus: Laying the Plans for Interstellar Travel
wildcat2030 via Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future:
Andreas Tziolas is drafting a blueprint for a mission to a nearby star. Here, he discusses how we’ll get there — and why we try. We humans have known for a very long time that going to the stars will be difficult, if not impossible. The motto of NASA, Per Aspera Ad Astra, a latin phrase meaning “through hardship to the stars,” comes down to us all the way from Seneca the Younger, a contemporary of Nero. Even today…when we strain to capture the difficulty of a task, or the enormity of an achievement, “reach for the stars” is the first and most natural phrase that comes to mind. …With today’s best propulsion technology, chemical rockets, it would take between 50 and a 100 millennia to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun. The ideas we have about how to expedite such a journey are just that: ideas. They belong to the realm of speculation. Nonetheless, they are beginning to take on an empirical glow. To be sure, the bundle of technologies that could conceivably send a spacecraft to another star won’t be here within the decade, or even within several, but neither are those technologies mere magical realism — indeed, planning for their development has begun in earnest… >continue @ theatlantic.com<
