In honor of the Kennedy Space Center’s 50th anniversary, the Google Maps team has just added something very cool: an all-access pass to the KSC. You can now take a Street View walk through rooms you’d never have access to without some serious security clearance. More »
NASA has thrown open the doors to the Kennedy Space Center, though only to Google’s Street View cameras, allowing anyone with a browser to wander through the Florida facility. The vast Vehicle Assembly Building, Atlantis shuttle and Launch Pad 39A are all navigable, offering a hitherto unseen opportunity to explore.
There are some great details to be spotted, too. It’s possible to walk underneath the shuttle itself, and look up to see the thousands of ceramic tiles that protected the craft’s underbelly from the huge temperatures of re-entry; the rest of the shuttle is looking a bit shabby, though we can’t really blame it considering its been around the world the equivalent of 200 times.
[youtube uJCwEFX2yRY]
Space shuttle Endeavour is also on show, along with the Firing Room with its rows of control panels. Other rooms hold individual shuttle engines, and there’s the Apollo/Saturn V Center and various museum rooms with old space suits and more.
It’s Google’s largest special Street View project to-date, the company says, and a great opportunity to build up your space excitement ahead of the upcoming Mars Curiosity landing in just a few days time. NASA itself will be livestreaming the whole landing.
NASA Kennedy Space Center gets Street View treatment is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
After NASA’s Curiousity attempts its tension-fraught landing on August 5th, you’ll be able to get one yourself in the form of this Hot Wheels die-cast model. The 1:64 scale buggy will reproduce the gutsy rover’s nuclear motor, drill, cameras and laser, while being a galaxy away from the $2.5 billion price tag, at a mere $1.09 or so. The real six-wheeled deal will need to hit all its marks perfectly when it attempts to land in a few days, with a complex sequence involving an atmospheric entry, parachute deployment, retro rocket firing and final crane-style drop. So, if you do end up with the toy version, hopefully it’ll be a good souvenir of a Spirit-like success — and not some other unmentionable Mars excursions.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Robots
Mattel casts NASA Curiosity rover die with new Hot Wheels toy originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Aug 2012 07:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
We’re just days away from the Curiosity rover’s touchdown on the surface of Mars, and with the historic event quickly approaching, NASA has started thinking about the future. Specifically, NASA chief Charles Bolden is thinking of manned missions to the red planet, which are planned to occur sometime in the 2030s. The US has been talking about manned missions to Mars for quite some time now, but when the moment finally arrives, Bolden says that the US won’t be going it alone.
“I have no desire to do a Mars landing on our own,’ Bolden told USA Today. “The U.S. cannot always be the leader, but we can be the inspirational leader through international cooperation in space exploration.” Bolden also said that any future trips to the moon will likely be based around international cooperation as well, meaning that the US is pretty much finished making advances in space exploration on its own.
Indeed, Bolden may not have much of a choice in the matter anyway. With NASA’s funding continuously getting cut, we’ll need to rely on scientists from other nations to get the job done. Even if money wasn’t an issue, a mission to Mars is a monumental undertaking, and it would serve well to have the world’s top minds working together on the mission instead of making it a US-only party.
For now, however, the focus remains squarely on the Curiosity rover and its landing on Mars, which is set to go down on August 6. We’re less than a week away from touchdown, and thankfully, NASA isn’t keep all the excitement to itself, announcing earlier this week that it will be live streaming the entire landing. Be sure to check out our story timeline below for more information about the Curiosity rover and Mars in general!
As Curiosity rover touchdown nears, US says it won’t go to Mars alone is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
It’s time to get cute with science as NASA is working with Mattel toys to create none other than the Mars Curiosity Rover for their newest Hot Wheels lineup. This little beast of a vehicle is a 1:64 scale replica of the actual NASA Mars Curiosity Rover that’ll be touching down this Saturday Night on the red planet. This machine will be a mix of plastic and hardcore metal and will be landing approximately one month after the real deal makes its mark in just a few days.
This little toy shows off what’s basically the same set of pieces that the actual final rover is made up of, and die-cast quality will be in the mix as this legendary toymaker creates its newest in a line of officially licensed space-age vehicles. This toy will cost you right around $1.09 when it finally hit stores while the real six-wheeled rover cost NASA a cool $2.5 billion USD.
Back in 1997, Mattel worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well as the California Institute of Technology to create the Curiosity Rover’s distant cousin Sojourner. The Sojourner rover was much smaller than the Curiosity Rover and was part of a three-pack of toys that included the rover, it’s lander, and its spacecraft cruiser. The Curiosity Rover and the Sojourner were both part of Mars missions by NASA.
The Action Pack, as it was called, sold out several times as several different editions were released to stores over the years while JPL’s Commercial Technology Office manager made it clear that, “we hope this does indeed turn out to be a big hit” – referring to the toys, not the actual lander, of course. This newest release of the 2-inch long by 1.5-inch high by 1.25-inch wide (5 by 3.8 by 3.2 centimeters) toy is the only official model to have been announced by NASA thus far.
Check out our timeline below to catch up with Curiosity in all its many fabulous angles, from 3D cameras to landing sequences to how you can catch it on video as it happens!
[via Collect Space]
Mars Curiosity Rover reaches for youth audience with Hot Wheels is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Like NASA says, these stars look like the thousand bright flashes of people taking photos just before a big rock concert. In reality, they are the oldest stars in our very own Milky Way, captured by Hubble. More »
NASA wants as many eyeballs as possible to enjoy developments made towards the space age, by announcing that they will be broadcasting the Mars Mission landing live in where else but New York’s iconic Times Square. Toshiba will have the honor of having their Toshiba Vision screen that is located in New York City’s Times Square to be the largest East Coast location for the public to view live mission coverage of Curiosity, the most advanced planetary rover from NASA to date, as it is calculated to touch down on Martian soil at 1:31 a.m. EDT this coming August 6th.
The Toshiba Vision screen in question will perform the broadcast of NASA TV coverage from 11:30 p.m. EDT August 5 onwards, where it will continue doing so (I do wonder if that would mean the entire live broadcast is ad-free?) until 4 a.m. EDT the next day. All programming will hail from Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) in Pasadena, California. We do wonder what the two years of scientific detective work will be performed by the new planetary rover known as Curiosity – hopefully it lives up to the name, and no proverbial cats will be killed in the process. [Press Release]
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: NASA’s Z-1 prototype spacesuit is completely versatile, NASA and Microsoft release Mars Rover Landing game,
NASA is milking the coming landing of the Curiosity rover for all it’s worth with numerous videos to get people excited about the Rover landing on the surface of the red planet. The nuclear powered Curiosity Rover is set to touch down on the surface of Mars, if all goes well, at 1:31 AM EDT on August 6, 2012.
To promote the landing, NASA has offered up a pair of new videos called Grand Entrance that guide viewers from the entry to Mars’ atmosphere through the descent of the Rover until it’s ready to conduct its mission. The videos have the same exact content and the only difference is the Star Trek actors that narrate. One video is narrated by William Shatner and the other is narrated by Wil Wheaton.
If you can’t see the videos above, you can view Shatner’s video here, and Wheaton’s here. Which one do you prefer?
We all know that NASA put men on the moon in the 1960s during the Apollo program. Each one of the landing sites on the moon from the Apollo missions has its own American flag standing proudly. One question that many fans of space exploration in the US have wondered is, are those flags still standing after all these years.
Scientists have been pouring over the moon photographs taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera and have determined that most of the flags are still standing after all these years. According to the scientists, all the American flags are standing with one exception. The flag from Apollo 11 has fallen over.
“From the LROC images it is now certain that the American flags are still standing and casting shadows at all of the sites, except Apollo 11,” LROC principal investigator Mark Robinson wrote in a blog post today(July 27). “Astronaut Buzz Aldrin reported that the flag was blown over by the exhaust from the ascent engine during liftoff of Apollo 11, and it looks like he was correct!” The one flag that is no longer standing was blown over before the Apollo 11 mission ended.
It’s really not much of a surprise that all of the flags are still standing considering the moon has little gravity and no wind. The image you see here is of the Apollo 11 landing site showing no flag shadow. The scientists studied photographs taken at various times of day looking for shadows cast by the flags from various angles to confirm that they were still standing. Maybe one day we will go back to the moon and see these flags in person.
“Intuitively, experts mostly think it highly unlikely the Apollo flags could have endured the 42 years of exposure to vacuum, about 500 temperature swings from 242 F during the day to -280 F during the night, micrometeorites, radiation and ultraviolet light, some thinking the flags have all but disintegrated under such an assault of the environment,” scientist James Fincannon, of the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, wrote in the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.
[via Space.com]
LRO photos show most American flags on the moon still standing is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
NASA is plugging its Mars Curiosity Rover for all it’s worth using social media, video, and a slew of press releases to raise public knowledge and interest in the exploration of the surface of Mars. Curiosity is the largest rover we’ve ever put on the red planet, and it is nuclear powered. The goal of Curiosity is to explore a massive crater on the surface of Mars in hopes of determining whether Mars harbors life of some sort or ever had life in the past.
NASA has shown us its 7 minutes of Terror video in the past outlining the highly complicated and dangerous process that Curiosity will go through as it enters the Martian atmosphere and descends to the surface. NASA now has two new videos called Grand Entrance each narrated by famous Star Trek actors. William Shatner narrates one video, and Wil Wheaton narrates the other.
Both videos are identical with the only difference being brief shots of each actor overlaid on the video and the voice narrating. Each video has the same verbiage and goes over how Curiosity has 7 minutes to go from its 13,000 mph speed down to a speed low enough for safe, soft landing.
It’s too bad NASA didn’t hire Patrick Stewart rather than Wheaton. It’s not that I don’t like Wil Wheaton, but had Stewart narrated the other video; we could’ve had a straight-up NASA video Picard versus Kirk brawl. “Shatner and Wheaton are mavericks in inspiring film, TV and social media audiences about space,” said Bert Ulrich, NASA’s multimedia liaison for film and TV collaborations. “NASA is thrilled to have them explain a difficult landing sequence in accessible terms that can be understood by many. Thanks to their generous support, Mars exploration will reach Tweeters, Trekkies and beyond!”
William Shatner and Wil Wheaton narrate NASA Grand Entrance videos is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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