Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to Thursday everyone. Today Amazon held its highly anticipated Kindle Fire event, marking our third press event in two days. Amazon didn’t disappoint either, announcing a handful of new Kindle Fire tablets and the new Kindle Paperwhite. It was a very exciting event, and you can get a nice little recap of all of the news in our full Amazon Kindle event wrap-up. Be sure to check that out for all of our announcement and hands-on posts from the day.

We didn’t end the hands-on posts with just Amazon, however, as we also delivered hands-on “extended cuts” for both the Nokia Lumia 920 and the more budget-friendly Lumia 820, which were both announced yesterday. With these new Lumias revealed, Nokia cut the price on the existing Lumia line while reports said that the production of these new Lumia phones is being done in-house. The company also said that its OIS ad for the Lumia 920 was faked, and we tell you how you can watch Nokia’s reveal of the 920 and 820 all over again.

Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram has been finalized, and it seems that the launch of the iPhone 5 will mark the death of the iPhone 3GS. The iPhone has retained its customer satisfaction crown – even gaining a little bit on last year’s survey results – and bad news for Samsung today, as the company is now under an antitrust investigation in South Korea after Apple filed a 3G complaint against it.

Tumblr has been tweaked on iOS and Android, Samsung’s Galaxy S III handset has hit 20 million sales worldwide, and it seems that Apple TV talks have stalled. Samsung is gearing up to launch the Galaxy S Relay at T-Mobile in the next few weeks, and MaxTV has a new soundbar on the scene that’s promising some big sound. Western Digital has introduced a new line of external storage solutions for Mac and PC users, and Kobo has launched a new line of eReaders. While Google was announcing that Ice Cream Sandwich is now installed on a fifth of all Android devices, ASUS was busy announcing its new “Powered by ASUS” program for custom PCs.

We had quite a bit of space-related news today, with the Mars Curiosity rover beginning to analyze the air around it to search for signs of methane. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have performed a second space walk to make repairs to the ISS, and finally tonight, NASA’s Dawn probe has left the asteroid named Vesta, where it has resided for the past 13 months.

That does it for tonight’s Evening Wrap-Up. Now all you need to do is go out and enjoy the rest of your evening!

SlashGear Evening Wrap-Up: September 6, 2012 is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

I think one of the coolest things an astronaut or cosmonaut can ever do is take a spacewalk. Being out in space floating above the Earth would have to be one of the most amazing experiences any human could have. Yesterday a pair of Russian cosmonauts living on the international space station took a spacewalk to upgrade some components on the space station.

The cosmonauts who participated on the spacewalk were Gennady Padalka and Yuri Malenchenko. The pair were expected to be outside the ISS for about 6 1/2 hours to complete maintenance and repairs on the exterior of the space station. The Russian cosmonauts ventured outside the ISS after exiting the Pirs module wearing Russian Orlan spacesuits.

The spacewalk was the first for the Expedition 32 mission. Another spacewalk for the mission will be conducted by two other astronauts for NASA on August 30. Padalka and Malenchenko focused on installing new micrometeoroid debris shields over certain parts of the Russian Zvezda service module. The cosmonauts also moved a hand-operated crane called the Strela-2 from the Pirs docking module to the Zarya control module.

Once the primary mission goals for the spacewalk were completed, the cosmonauts were going to try to retrieve a pair of science experiments from the outside of space station. The experiments included panels that were being used to determine how different materials reacted in the vacuum of space. If the cosmonauts were able to find themselves with even more time, they were planning to launch a small spherical satellite from the ISS.

[via Space.com]

Cosmonauts on ISS take a spacewalk is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Two days might not seem that long for your latest Amazon order’s arrival. But for the crew of the International Space Station, waiting 48 hours for fresh supplies must be an eternity. That’s why NASA and Rosaviakosmos have melded new technology and an old technique to deliver supplies eight times faster than ever before. More »

The International Space Station is set to get a new camera that will be tasked with observing Earth on ISS orbits. The camera system is called ISERV and will launch aboard the Japanese HTV-3 transfer vehicle this week. Once the camera reaches the ISS, it will be installed to allow researchers on the ground to control and acquire images of specific areas of the globe for disaster analysis and environmental studies.

ISERV Pathfinder is an imaging instrument that was designed and built at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. The spacecraft the camera is aboard will launch today at 10:06 PM from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. The name ISERV stands for International Space Station SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System.

The camera system will be installed in the Window Observational Research Facility inside the ISS Destiny laboratory. The camera is a modified commercial telescope driven by custom software that we use the Earth facing side window aboard Destiny to shoot pictures of the Earth’s surface and transmit the data to scientists on the ground. It appears that the camera portion is a standard DSLR camera from the photo.

New Earth observation camera called ISERV headed to ISS is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Lightning doesn’t always shoot downwards. Just occasionally, a thunderstorm will be accompanied by a red sprite: a huge, momentary electrical explosion that occurs around 50 miles high and fires thin tendrils many miles further up into the atmosphere. Sprites have been caught on camera before, but a fresh photo taken by arty astronauts on the ISS helps to show off their true scale. Captured accidentally during a timelapse recording, it reveals the bright lights of Myanmar and Malaysia down below, with a white flash of lightning inside a storm cloud and, directly above that, the six mile-wide crimson streak of the rare beast itself. Such a thing would never consent to being bottled up and examined, but somehow observers at the University of Alaska did manage to film one close-up at 1000 frames per second back in 1999 — for now, their handiwork embedded after the break is as intimate as we can get.

Continue reading NASA captures red sprite, puts it in a jar

Filed under: Science

NASA captures red sprite, puts it in a jar originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Jul 2012 07:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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