August 2007 - Posts
The field for the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is leaner than it was, with two teams dropping out of the rocket competition. The exit of Micro-Space and a mysterious unnamed group leaves seven teams still in the hunt - but there could be further spills and thrills between now and October's Wirefly X Prize Cup contest, says organizer Will Pomerantz. You don't have to look any further than the setback recently suffered by the Lunar Lander Challenge's front-runner to see that.
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NASA |
CLICK IMAGE FOR VIDEO
A 1994 NBC retrospective
looks at the Apollo 11
mission and its legacy.
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The Internet Archive, whose mission is to preserve the riches of the online world, has struck a deal with NASA to preserve the riches from nearly five decades of space missions. Many of those visual gems are already available from a variety of Web sources, but the deal represents the latest attempt to bring order to NASA's terabytes of photos, text documents and particularly video.
A few Web pointers will help you get by while the Internet Archive ramps up its interplanetary Wayback Machine.
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NASA / JPL / Univ. of Ariz. |
Sunlight is reflected off the wall of a Martian pit.
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Fresh imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows that the strange holes detected in earlier pictures of the Red Planet's surface are most likely vertical pits rather than openings to underground cave networks, as some had previously speculated.
Here's the latest from the imaging team for the MRO's high-resolution camera, or HiRISE, posted today on its Web site:
"Dark pits on some of the Martian volcanoes have been speculated to be entrances into caves. A previous HiRISE image, looking essentially straight down, saw only darkness in this pit.
"This time the pit was imaged from the west. Since the picture was taken at about 2:30 p.m. local (Mars) time, the sun was also shining from the west. We can now see the eastern wall of the pit catching the sunlight.
"This confirms that this pit is essentially a vertical shaft cut through the lava flows on the flank of the volcano. Such pits form on similar volcanoes in Hawaii and are called 'pit craters.' They generally do not connect to long open caverns but are the result of deep underground collapse. From the shadow of the rim cast onto the wall of the pit we can calculate that the pit is at least 78 meters (255 feet) deep. The pit is 150 by 157 meters (492 by 515 feet) across."
Insiders tell NBC News that NASA has found nothing in the past 20 years of spaceflight to back up last month's allegations that some astronauts used alcohol heavily just before flight - and one space pioneer says many of his colleagues are "pissed off" over what the original report has done to the reputation of the astronaut corps.
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China Photos via Getty Images |
A composite photo shows the progress of the lunar eclipse on Tuesday, as seen
from Chongqing, China. The Pacific Rim had front-row seats for the event.
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Most Americans didn't get a chance to see the year's first total lunar eclipse back in March - but we were in a much better position for the year’s second lunar eclipse, taking place in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.
For many on the East Coast, the moon faded away just when the show was getting good, with totality beginning at 5:52 a.m. ET. The timing was somewhat better for the West Coast, where the eclipse played out during the middle of the night. But folks who were outside the prime eclipse zone, or frustrated by cloudy skies, could still get a taste of totality by tuning in real-time Webcasts from around the world. And if you slept through the whole eclipse, never fear: You can still catch the highlights online.
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NASA / ESA / JHUAPL / SwRI |
It's been exactly a year since the International Astronomical Union busted Pluto down a rank, from one of the solar system's nine major planets to one of potentially thousands of dwarf planets. Scientifically speaking, the debate over planethood for Pluto (and other denizens of deep space) will go on for years. But when it's time to buy that glow-in-the-dark planetary mobile, you're increasingly likely to get eight planets, plus an explanation.
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Slooh |
Today you can see the night sky from your computer, using the newly announced Google Sky or a more traditional gallery like HubbleSite. But that's just one small step toward hacking the sky for yourself. Internet-based ventures such as Slooh and Global Rent-a-Scope let you operate a real live telescope and take pictures by remote control.
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Does the future of energy lie in fuel cells? You might think so, based on what chemists have cooked up for this week’s annual meeting of the American Chemical Society. One team has come out with a pellet system that could open the way for safe and easy hydrogen-based fuel, while another has developed a battery-scale fuel-cell system that capitalizes on, um, the microbes in a cow’s guts. Such technologies could provide less smelly alternatives to the poop-fueled systems that are already belching out power today.
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Now you too can be a space shuttle tile inspector. A new collection of shuttle imagery, offered through our portal to Space World, lets you click through the detailed pictures of the shuttle Endeavour’s underbelly that were taken 10 days ago from the international space station. NASA analysts will be making an even closer inspection of the imagery, as well as photos taken after landing, to decide what needs to be done for future missions. CONTINUED >>
Mars Society |
Simulation crew member Ryan Kobrick flashes a thumbs-up sign outside the Mars
Society's habitat in the Canadian Arctic as a 100-day expedition winds down.
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The Mars Society’s 100-day simulation of an expedition to the Red Planet is wrapping up in the Canadian Arctic - and although some have scoffed at the exercise as little more than grown-ups "pretending to be space explorers," a prominent NASA researcher who participated in the effort says the crew has done groundbreaking research.
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The Slashdot set is buzzing over a new experiment that seems to indicate light can move faster than … um, the speed of light. The fact that the last statement sounds so strange hints at the bizarre caveats that surround such experiments, and mainstream scientists have argued for years that the phenomena really don’t break Einstein’s rules of the relativistic road. At the same time, they admit that the results are pretty darn weird. And weirder experiments are on their way.
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Galactic Suite |
This artist's conception shows a Galactic Suite hotel serviced by a space shuttle.
Executives at 4Frontiers say the final designs may be dramatically different.
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Can a Spanish-led venture really put a luxury space hotel in orbit by 2012? No way, says a Florida firm that has served as a consultant to the Galactic Suite venture. But if you look beyond 2015, the job just might be doable, representatives of 4Frontiers Corp. say.
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Courtesy of Jerry Ehman / BigEar.org |
The code "6EQUJ5" indicates a radio signal detected in 1977 at the Big Ear Radio
Observatory in Ohio - a signal so strong that astronomer Jerry Ehman wrote "Wow!"
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Exactly 30 years ago today, astronomer Jerry Ehman was looking over a printout of radio data from Ohio State University's Big Ear Radio Observatory when he saw a string of code so remarkable that he had to circle it and scribble "Wow!" in the margin. The printout recorded an anomalous signal so strong that it had to come from an extraordinary source.
Was it a burst of human-made interference? Or an alien broadcast from the stars? No one knows. The source of the "Wow" signal has never been heard from again - even though astronomers have looked for it dozens of times.
Now the SETI Institute is gearing up to look for it one more time, using the latest tool for seeking signals from extraterrestrial civilizations: the Allen Telescope Array in California.
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Submitted by Peter Orvick |
A Perseid streak stands out amid the stars in a picture taken from rural Minnesota.
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Now that the fireworks have settled down, skywatchers say the weekend's Perseid meteor shower performed about as expected - with fantastic displays separated by not-so-fantastic delays. "Seemingly interminable five- to 10-minute gaps ... followed by five meteors within 60 seconds," Bill Godley reported on the Meteorobs discussion forum. That roughly matches my own assessment, based on my outings early Sunday and Monday.
An even more elusive prize awaits: the Aurigids, which could outshine the Perseids - but only for a brief interval, in a particular area of the country, under special conditions. Take a look at some of the snapshots taken during recent meteor sightings, and get some special tips for the finicky fireworks ahead.
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Bigelow Aerospace |
Bigelow Aerospace's billionaire founder says he'll be skipping a step in his grand plan to send up an inflatable space habitat capable of hosting humans, due to escalating launch costs. That means Bigelow's Sundancer module, which will be designed to accommodate three people, could be ready to go even before 2010.
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This weekend, outer space isn’t just something to dream about: There are opportunities galore to take part in space adventures, online and offline.
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CMU / Tartan Racing |
Today the Pentagon revealed its list of 36 contestants for the next multimillion-dollar race for autonomous vehicles - and also revealed where the robo-finalists will face off in November. It may be called the "DARPA Urban Challenge," but the race course is actually a slice of faded suburbia in the California desert.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says the competition will take place on the decommissioned George Air Force Base near Victorville, Calif. - home to a 1,000-building complex that's been used for urban combat training and has thus been dubbed "Al-George."
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NBC News |
Clay Morgan is supportive of his
astronaut-wife's space aspirations.
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Educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan is the star of the show today - but her husband, Clay, has made a name for himself as well, as a published author. While Mrs. Morgan went through space training at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Mr. Morgan wrote up a history of the shuttle-Mir program for the space agency, and you can read his work online.
Clay Morgan is better-known for his fiction, however, including a well-received novel for middle-schoolers titled "The Boy Who Spoke Dog." His reflections on the life of a writer sheds light on the life of his astronaut wife as well.
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More than 85,000 Internet users have signed up to become galaxy inspectors as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's "Galaxy Zoo" project - and you can, too. Inspectors go through a tutorial and click their way through an initial database of 1 million galaxies, classifying them by type. Since the project was launched, less than a month ago, each galaxy in the current database has been checked multiple times (for a total of 12 million checks), but the organizers say there’s much more work that this astronomical army can do.
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Microsoft |
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CLICK ON IMAGE TO VISIT SPACE WORLD
One of the Photosynth collections in Space World
shows the shuttle Endeavour on its launch pad.
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You've seen zoomable pictures of outer-space sights, and synthetic 3-D views of alien worlds, and 360-degree panoramas of space scenes ... but today there's a brand-new way to look at the highlights of the high frontier: Space World, a photo database offered through MSNBC.com and powered by a technology called Photosynth.
The experimental software, pioneered by Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington, combines elements of all the visualization tools I've mentioned, plus an extra bit of video-game flash. Just how cool is it? That's for you to say.
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Bigelow Aerospace |
Bigelow Aerospace's Genesis 2 inflatable space module has been turned into an orbital billboard - not the kind you can see from Earth, but the kind that can project ads or announcements onto the spacecraft's skin itself, with a picture taken for posterity. And as of now, the billboard is open for business, according to the private space effort's billionaire backer.
The first picture showing the billboard in action was put up on Bigelow Aerospace's Web site on Thursday, and company founder Robert Bigelow reported that more samples were posted today. The samples range from small company logos to big color photographs of Bigelow Aerospace employees.
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This week's tragic collapse of the Interstate 35W Bridge in Minneapolis triggered another collapse of sorts: a jam-up of the cellular phone networks in the area. Bystanders and survivors tried to phone loved ones, only to find that they couldn't put the call through. So what's the solution? Two words: text messaging.
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Here are some Web links that delve into some of the technological questions raised by Wednesday's bridge collapse in Minneapolis, courtesy of Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science and the American Institute of Physics:
So how safe are your local bridges? For piles and piles of information about the nation's bridge infrastructure, check out this Web page on the Resource Shelf and this one on Massroads.com. The searchable database of the National Bridge Inventory isn't accessible right now, but I trust that it will be back in business once the traffic subsides.
FuelVapor Technologies |
Thirty-one teams say they’ll line up to compete for at least $10 million by developing a marketable 100-mpg automobile … if the Automotive X Prize program can come up with the cash, that is. The X Prize Foundation says it’s hoping to do that by the end of the year, in time for the big auto shows.
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