Happy July 4th.
Good day to showcase a NASA photo showing "the American flag and a mini-DVD on the Phoenix's deck, which is about 3 feet above the Martian surface. The mini-DVD from the Planetary Society contains a message to future Martian explorers, science fiction stories and art inspired by the Red Planet, and the names of more than a quarter million Earthlings."
NASA is calling for next-gen space suit designs for its next-gen Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle which will carry astronauts to the International Space Station and longer term to the Moon and Mars.
Should be able to withstand tears on the vehicle (given how astronauts float around in the weightlessness), and the radiation on the moon and who knows what on Mars. And of course allow astronauts to play golf and look cool while doing it :)
"Astronomy textbooks typically present galaxies as staid, solitary, and majestic island worlds of glittering stars. But galaxies have a dynamical side. They have close encounters that sometimes end in grand mergers and overflowing sites of new star birth as the colliding galaxies morph into wondrous new shapes. Today, in celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope's 18th launch anniversary, 59 views of colliding galaxies constitute the largest collection of Hubble images ever released to the public. This new Hubble atlas dramatically illustrates how galaxy collisions produce a remarkable variety of intricate structures in never-before-seen detail."
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) brings together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world. Created with Microsoft's high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, it enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources.
See a sneak preview from the TED conference.
Lunar eclipse
Space Shuttle mission STS-122 lands safely
US shoots down errant satellite USA 193
Geoengineering is defined as the intentional, large-scale modification of the global environment...and here are 10 ambitious ideas from ocean seeding to cloud seeding to space mirrors to try and counter global warming....the ideas may be zany or innovative depending on where you sit.
I am kidding, right? Read on at Popular Science
"Nigeria has some pretty practical goals. It isn't looking to land humans on asteroids nor does it want to hunt for water on Mars or take snapshots of Saturn's rings—all those missions are luxuries, Boroffice says. Nigeria's goal is to use space technology to address problems here on earth, and, yes, to make money off it. With the help of China, it recently launched its first communication satellite. The plan is to rent out some of the bandwidth to private telecommunications companies...More clear cut are the benefits of the nation's earth observation satellite (launched in 2003 with the help of British company Surrey Satellites). It's monitoring things like crop health and desert encroachment, which is in turn boosting the nation's food supply. Boroffice told me that thanks to the earth-observation satellite Nigeria has had more success growing its staple crop, a root tuber that Nigerians use to make tapioca, among other things..."
"Today, the University of California, Berkeley and the SETI Institute announced that the first 42 radio dishes of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) are activated and collecting scientific data from the far reaches of the universe. This is the first phase of a planned 350 radio dishes that will advance the capabilities of radio astronomy research. Paul G. Allen, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist whose foundation donated seed money that started the project in 2001, joined representatives of UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute to launch the array. "
"The Peter Diamandis-led group announced the $30 million Google Lunar X
Prize today, a competition for privately funded robotic lunar
exploration. The foundation hopes that this largest-ever X Prize purse
will see the development of multiple new, low-cost methods of robotic
space exploration, as well as begin capitalizing on the moon's
potential as "a source of solutions to some of the most pressing
environmental problems that we face on Earth—energy independence and
climate change.""
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