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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NASA has smashed its record for transmitting data to and from the moon. Now, it boasts a frankly amazing 622Mbps transfer speed to the rock that circles our little planet.
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Even though it might not look like much when it’s so far away, the Moon is pretty huge. In fact, if it was a little closer—as close as the ISS for example—it would monopolize the entire sky.
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You might think that this image looks a little bodged together, and you’d be right to. After all, it’s literally a collage of photographs obtained by Voyager I—all the way back in 1979.
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When we saw a guy strapped to a crane, bounced between colored spots on the floor, we had to have a go find out more. Within CEATEC, there are halls filled with companies you’ve not yet heard of. TE Connectivity is probably one of them, regardless of the fact that it’s a huge producer of data connectors, power protectors and other things that mass producers like. Now, exactly why it’s got this moon gravity simulator at the front of its stand is harder to explain, but it has a lot to do with promoting TE’s other products. The simulator includes a high-speed USB connector right above the harness, floor sensors that detect your landing, some other NASA-authorized parts and dynamic sensors within the balance motor that ensure that any hobbyist astronauts in training (like ourselves) don’t spin out of control while bounding around at 0.6G.
A computer behind the scenes continuously calculates and adjusts exactly how much lift it gives your body once you’re strapped in. Then the aim to this demo is to hop between specific colored spots on the ground, which was a little harder than it sounds. We strap ourselves in after the break. %Gallery-slideshow99771%
New research has been published that suggests the moon is massively younger than scientists previously believed. The new research suggests that the moon is between 4.4 billion and 4.45 billion years old. That finding makes it tens of millions of years younger than previously believed. Scientists say that this finding could reshape the way science […]
You’ve seen the moon more times than you can count in your lifetime. But you’ve never seen it like this.
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The moon is not as far away as some things
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It’s nearly impossible for us to imagine how the Earth might look to someone who’s only ever seen it from a local’s vantage point. But thanks to the Library of Congress, we don’t have to imagine—newly posted images of 19th century drawings show us exactly what humans thought the Earth looked like far before we could ever have known for sure. The Smithsonian compiled a few of them, and some of our favorites lie below. You can see the rest over at The Library of Congress here. [Library of Congress via The Smithsonian]
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One year ago (and two days), the family of Neil Armstrong announced that this navy fighter pilot, test pilot, and astronaut passed away at the age of 82. Making known that Armstrong was a “reluctant American hero”, his family said that he “always believed he was just doing his job.” Neil Armstrong became the first […]
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