Space
Toshiba UK |
Click for video: An armchair floats to the edge of space in Toshiba's "Space
Chair Project" commercial. Click on the image to see Toshiba's video on YouTube.
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Space ballooning hits new heights in an HDTV commercial showing a simple armchair floating against the backdrop of our curving planet, almost 100,000 feet above the ground. When you watch the video, the first thought that comes to mind is, "Wow, that's cool!" And the second thought is probably, "How the heck did they do that?"
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NASA / ESA |
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An ethereal "X" or boxlike structure marks the chaotic center of the edge-on
galaxy NGC 4710. Click on the picture for a larger version.
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One of the "X-Files" that astronomers keep in their filing cabinets relates to the mysterious X shape seen at the center of some galaxies — but this particular mystery may be close to being explained.
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Malcolm Park |
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A fireball seems to shoot right through a house in Grafton, Ontario. Malcolm Park
captured the image as he was setting up to photograph meteors on Monday night.
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This week's Leonid meteor shower may not rise to the level of a shooting-star storm, but it's certainly producing a flurry of fine-looking pictures.
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S. Abe and H. Yano / NASA / ISAS |
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Meteors flash brightly in a picture taken from an aircraft flying at an altitude of
39,000 feet during the 1999 Leonids Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign.
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The Internet can help you get a great view of this week's Leonids or any other meteor shower, on your computer screen or in the honest-to-goodness night sky.
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ESA |
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The OSIRIS camera on the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft captured
this view of Earth from 393,000 miles (633,000 kilometers) away on Thursday.
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Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is making its final flyby past Earth on its way to an asteroid and a comet – a close encounter that should yield beautiful pictures of our home planet, and perhaps the answer to a cosmic mystery as well.
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NASA |
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A NASA graphic traces the asteroid 2009 VA's path within the moon's orbit and past
Earth. Each dot on the 2009 VA line indicates an hour of time along the route.
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Asteroid-watchers say a space rock about as big as a garage came within 9,000 miles (14,000 kilometers) of Earth last Friday, just 15 hours after it was detected.
Experts quickly determined that the asteroid 2009 VA would miss us - and even if it came directly at us, it wouldn't have caused a catastrophe. Nevertheless, the close encounter serves as a reminder that someday a much bigger rock may well hit us and that it's best to be prepared.
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NASA / ESA / SSC / CXC / STScI |
Click for video: Color-coded images from NASA's three Great Observatories —
the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes — are combined to produce this
spectacular view of the Milky Way galaxy's central region. Click on the image to
watch a video about the image from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
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NASA has blended three views of our home galaxy's turbulent core to produce a picture filled with scientifically significant snap, crackle and pop. And the deeper you go into the image, the more you learn.
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NASA / ESA / U. of Va. / STScI / ANU |
Click for video: Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 captures a detailed view of
starbirth in the spiral galaxy M83. Click on the image to watch a zoom-in video.
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The Hubble Space Telescope's new wide-field camera has sent down a picture showing how the "assembly line" of starbirth works in a nearby spiral galaxy.
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Reed Saxon / AP |
LaserMotive's David Bashford, right,
prepares a robotic climber for its
ascent on Wednesday.
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Just days after $1.65 million was won in a NASA-backed rocket contest, it looks as if big money will be awarded in the $2 million Power Beaming Challenge as well.
Like the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, the Power Beaming Challenge is part of NASA's Centennial Challenges, a program aimed at encouraging new technologies that could be adopted by the space agency for future exploration. This particular competition could eventually lay the groundwork for future space elevators - but power-beaming technology is likely to be put to work even if those space elevators are never built.
Teams entered in the challenge have been working on robotic transport systems that can be remotely powered by laser beams to climb up a long steel cable. The contest, part of the Space Elevator Games managed by the Spaceward Foundation, started up in 2005 and has been getting progressively harder every year.
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The countdown is ticking toward some multibillion-dollar decisions on America's future in space, as explained in my big-picture analysis today. When the space shuttle fleet is retired, will NASA stay the course with its Ares rocket development effort, or will it emphasize buying seats on other people's spaceships instead? It's a question that touches upon technical as well as political complexities.
Want to feel like an insider? Here are some Web sites that give you countdown status reports on the space debate:
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