NASA and Boeing have released a little teaser on their newest spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, which will be built and tested at Kennedy Space Center and hopefully, eventually taxi people to space.
Imagine touring space inside one of these awesome pods in the future. The video below highlights some features of the Starliner.
Before New Horizons completed its trip to Pluto, space geeks around the world were just as fascinated with another one of our solar system’s icy orbs: Ceres. Now that New Horizons is well on its way to the outer edges of the Solar System — and we’re stuck waiting to see the images it took — some of the spotlight is back on Ceres. And while much has already been learned about this other dwarf planet, one question still remains — what the hell are those bright spots?
This new image taken by the Dawn spacecraft doesn’t answer that outright, but it does give us the most detailed look at the spots yet, which are located in what NASA scientists have named the Occator crater. What we do know is that they are undoubtably and remarkably bright. The difference in brightness between the spots and the rest of Ceres is so great that this new glimpse of Ceres is actually made from two images: one specifically exposed capture the detail you see in the bright spots, and one exposed for the surface detail of the crater around those spots.
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has spotted the bright, reflective patches in a crater on Ceres from a closer orbit.
Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen performed the breath-taking experiment in which he placed a peg into a very tight hole on Monday under the careful control of the European Space Agency.
While orbiting some 400 kilometres (250 miles) above Earth, Mogensen took control of the Interact Centaur rover which has a pair of arms for delicate, high-precision work.
The blue-and-white fibreglass robot, which cost less than 200,000 euros ($224,000) to build, also has a camera on its head which allows the controller to directly see the task it is performing.
I invite you all to like my new Facebook community page meant to be a place to discuss extrasolar planet-related issues as they relate to my seminal book on the subject: “Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System.” https://www.facebook.com/pages/Distant-Wanderers-The-Search-…294?ref=hl
Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System, my first book, was published in October 2001.
Boeing Space Taxis in a couple of years.
This past Friday, Boeing unveiled its most recent assembly plant in Florida, only the new facility won’t be building commercial jets or fighter aircraft. Instead, it will be building spaceships, yes actual spaceships.
Boeing is aiming to have its soon-to-be-flown spaceships in the air and space by 2017. Dubbed the CST-100 Starliner, the spaceships could potentially be the first commercial spacecrafts on the market, though Boeing is in a tight race with SpaceX.
Continue reading “Space race heating up as Boeing partners with NASA” »
1. The Habitat.
2. Farming in space.
Continue reading “7 real NASA technologies in sci-fi movie The Martian” »
The first VASIMR experiment was conducted at MIT in 1983 on their magnetic mirror device plasma device, and in 1998 ASPL created the first VASIMR rocket, the VX-10. By 2005 the ASPL had created the VX-50, which was capable of up to 50kW of plasma discharge. So, what’s so significant about this design?
The now-famous hoverboard company will work over the next few years to tug NASA’s tiny satellites.
Great news. It’ll be fascinating to see what they discover.
In the distant reaches of the Universe, exploding stars and supermassive black holes are bending the very fabric of spacetime. It’s hard to wrap our brains around such tremendous forces, but we may be able to quantify them, in the form of gravitational waves. A new European Space Agency mission marks humanity’s first bold attempt to do so in outer space.
This fall, the ESA’s LISA Pathfinder will be blasted into space on a course for the L1 Lagrange point. Situated nearly a million miles from Earth, it’ll begin pilot-testing fundamental technologies for the detection of elusive gravitational waves. The miniature science observatory bid farewell to the public this week, on display at a test centre in Ottobrunn, Germany for the last time before its long journey.
