Tag: space exploration

More on Heinlein

Still more remark on Robert A. Heinlein, this time by NASA’s head of legislative affairs, Bill Brunner: The first real novel I ever read was Rocketship Galileo. After that, I read as much Heinlein as I could find. I can honestly say that, as a young black male raised by a single mom, RAH shaped …

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Amazing photo of the International Space Station…

…snapped by high school students from the ground.

No puddles now…

…but Mars may once have been covered by ocean.

No puddles on Mars

That story I blogged about postulating possible puddles on Mars? Fuhgeddaboutit. Turns out the photo in question comes from the side of a crater–on terrain too steeply sloped for puddles to be possible. So neither the depressions in the photo, nor the startling hypothesis put forward concerning them, hold water. Too bad!

Does a hidden ocean of liquid water lurk beneath Titan’s surface?

Maybe. And if so, it could harbor life.

Puddles on Mars?

Is this a picture of puddles on Mars? UPDATE: No, it isn’t. Turns out the terrain in question is on a slope too steep to hold water…something the researchers somehow failed to notice.

Science fiction headline of the day:

“Star Trek shields will protect man in space.” From the TimesOnline story: “It’s no accident that Star Trek featured this sort of technology, as it had advisers who work for Nasa and it’s feasible,” Dr Bamford said. “The shields seem to be some sort of invisible barrier, which energy bounces off, and that sort of …

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Bigelow continues to plan big things

Robert Bigelow continues to have, er, “Big” plans for “low” earth orbit: The Bigelow Aerospace commercial inflatable manned space module venture intends to have three large multi-module outposts in Earth orbit by 2015 to serve different user communities.CEO Robert T. Bigelow says his engineers predict 800 paying crewmembers could fly to Bigelow outposts over the …

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Amazing video of a solar flare…

…here. It was captured by Japan’s Hinode spacecraft in January: “I managed to stay in my seat,” says solar physicist John Davis of the Marshall Space Flight Center, “but just barely.” Davis is NASA’s project scientist for Hinode, Japanese for Sunrise. The spacecraft was launched in Sept. 2006 from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan …

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Vast caverns on Mars…

…if they exist, would be a great place to look for life and water. Now some researchers think they may have spotted them.

Robotic sub to explore sinkhole

NASA is sending an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle–a.k.a. a robotic sub–to explore the world’s deepest sinkhole: Like La Pilita, Zacatón is in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas and was formed by the collapse of a limestone chamber dissolved by warm, acidic groundwater that originated in a nearby volcanic region. The current theory is that the cenote …

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Bigelow’s big plans

Bigelow Aerospace has big plans for Earth orbit–and beyond: Even as Bigelow Aerospace gears up for launching its second prototype space station into orbit, the company has set its sights on something much, much bigger: a project to assemble full-blown space villages at a work site between Earth and the moon, then drop them to …

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