Tag Archives: NASA
The best video NASA has ever produced – ‘7 minutes of terror’ – landing a robot on Mars
On Aug. 5 or Aug. 6, depending on which part of the country you’re in, the Curiosity spacecraft careening toward Mars will hit the Red Planet’s atmosphere, deploy a supersonic parachute and either land safely on the planet’s surface or perish. It’s dramatic stuff, and NASA has produced this Hollywood-style YouTube video, complete with …
The era of micro-spacecraft is here – ultra small satellites are everywhere
There is big news on the small satellite front. From super-secret agencies to the U.S. military, academia, private firms, world space agencies, and NASA, ultra-small satellites are the big thing. In sizing up “smallsats,” there are a range of classifications in the less-than-500- kilogram department, be they minisatellites, microsatellites, nanosatellites, picosatellites, palm-size CubeSats, even the diminutive …
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Prison inmates at San Quentin get contract to build satellite parts for NASA
The NASA Ames Research Center is known for establishing innovative partnerships and Pete Worden, the former Air Force general who serves as the Center’s director, is known as a maverick. Still, the latest joint venture to come to light has caught even some longtime NASA observers by surprise. Under supervision from NASA Ames, inmates working in the …
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Astronomers discover black hole with 140 trillion times more water than Earth
Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away. “The environment around this quasar is very unique …
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Astronomers discover a close new planet – covered in oceans of magma
In a surprise find, astronomers have discovered a planet possibly covered with oceans of magma “right around the corner.” Thirty-three light years away, “we have a sub-Earth-sized planet that’s slightly larger than Mars and essentially right around the corner, at least on a cosmic scale,” said Kevin Stevenson, a planetary scientist now at the University of Chicago UCF-1.01 …
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Hubble discovers another moon orbiting Pluto – that’s two in the last year
A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other …
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NASA’s master plan – to create the next space airlines
The Commercial Crew Program is responsible for helping companies develop vehicles that can ferry astronauts, and maybe civilians, to space. Could this lead to a ‘spaceline’ industry, a la the airlines? An interview with Ed Mango, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program: What’s the goal of the Commercial Crew Program? We still have Americans in …
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A rare opportunity – NASA opens Launch Control Center to visitors
For the first time in more than 30 years, NASA is allowing Kennedy Space Center visitors inside the Launch Control Center – where NASA directors and engineers supervised all of the 152 launches including the space shuttle and Apollo programs. The KSC Up-Close: Launch Control Center (LCC) Tour, the second in Kennedy Space Center’s special 50th …
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Voyager I – about to leave our Solar System
Last week, in the corners of the Internet devoted to outer space, things started to get a little, well, hot. Voyager 1, the man-made object farthest away from Earth, was encountering a sharp uptick in the number of a certain kind of energetic particles around it. Had the spacecraft become the first human creation to “officially” …
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