Underground, where this is no GPS and certainly no Wi-Fi, mapping caves requires a different kind of technical ingenuity. Thus, there is cave radio. To learn about the DIY world of cave radio and underground exploration, Gizmodo picked the brain of Stanley Sides, tinkerer and former president of the Cave Research Foundation.
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NASA’s next spacesuit is currently up for public voting—and the weird new designs are unlike anything you’ve seen from NASA before. Drawing on ideas from bioluminescence, contemporary sportswear, and some speculation on the street fashions of tomorrow, whichever suit gets built will change our image of astronauts forever.
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Polar explorers Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere of the Scott Expedition have successfully reached the South Pole—on foot. When Gizmodo last saw Saunders, he was here with us in New York City
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Thanks to millions and millions of years of evolution, sea turtles work. They work well. They can swim stealthily around the ocean, sliding between chunks of coral if necessary. That in mind, it’s no wonder the sea creatures are the inspiration for the latest underwater robots.
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If you’ve ever wanted to visit the extreme environments used as offworld training landscapes for future astronauts—where bleak, windswept, and often highly remote locations act as surrogates for the surfaces of other planets—a new guidebook will help you find them. Assembled for the European Space Agency by scientists at the Open University, The Catalogue of Planetary Analogues (PDF) is now available for download.
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Endurance athlete, polar explorer, and motivational speaker Ben Saunders is on his way to Antarctica. Recreating Robert Scott’s heroic but ultimately doomed "Terra Nova" expedition from 1910-1912, Saunders has launched his own Scott Expedition to reach the South Pole on foot—and, more importantly, to walk back to the coast alive. If successful, this will make him and his co-traveler, Tarka L’Herpiniere, the first human beings ever to have done so.
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Space may be the final frontier of exploration, but there’s plenty of Earth left unmapped, too—from the giant canyon recently discovered beneath Greenland
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While the people of Europe bravely set sail during the Age of Discovery—a period stretching from the early 15th century and continuing to the 17th century—it’s easy to forget that very few of the shores onto which they stepped were entirely uninhabited. This map shows the lands that were, until adventurers landed, entirely unexplored by a single human.
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As space exploration becomes democratized, the entry price for such endeavors has fallen dramatically. One company taking advantage of this is Pocket Spacecraft, a Bristol-based enterprise that thinks it can send thousands of personalized probes to the heavens for a few hundred dollars apiece. While it may look more like a used coffee filter, the Earth Scout / Lunar Scout is a CD-sized, paper-thin probe that contains a bonded solar cell, system-on-a-chip and antennas. Several thousand of these will be loaded onto a CubeSat and then dropped onto Earth or the Moon, depending on your project and contribution. Users who cough up the cash will then be able to observe how thin, papery probes journey downward, with telemetry being sent to an Android / iOS app. Anyone interested in backing the project on Kickstarter should check out the video after the break and then empty their savings of £99 ($150) to buy an Earth scout or £199 ($302) if they intend to explore the Moon.
Filed under: Transportation, Science
Source: Kickstarter
A couple of days ago, an story started making the rounds that suggested the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 had left our solar system and headed into interstellar space. Leaving our solar system would make Voyager 1 the first man-made spacecraft ever to exit our solar system.
The tip that the spacecraft had left our solar system came from an American Geophysical Union report. However, NASA is now saying that the consensus of the Voyager science team is that Voyager 1 has not yet left. The confusion comes in the fact that increasing radiation led some scientists to believe that Voyager 1 had left our solar system’s Heliosphere. However, Voyager project scientist Ed Stone disagrees.
Stone says that Voyager 1 has simply reached a new region of the Heliosphere called “The Magnetic Highway” where energetic particles change dramatically. Stone says that a change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change has not yet occurred. It’s amazing that we are still getting data from a spacecraft launched in 1977. Another amazing fact about the Voyager 1 is that while it was launched in more than 35 years ago, so far it has only traveled approximately 34 light hours and 13 light minutes away from the Earth at the time of writing.
[via PC Mag]
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