Cassini spacecraft spies evidence of a new moon in Saturn’s rings

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been studying Saturn for a long time. The spacecraft spied something interesting making its way through the rings of the giant planet. Cassini spied a disturbance … Continue reading

NASA to Launch Laser to ISS This Month for Communications Testing

NASA has announced that it is set to send the OPALS – or Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science – device to the ISS. What that means is that NASA is sending a laser up to the ISS that can be used to send messages including HD video back to the Earth with more bandwidth and speed than conventional methods. This is a big deal since the amount of data being sent back to Earth is growing constantly.

nasa lasermagnify

The OPALS device will be able to send data, including video, to Earth in the form of laser transmissions and is likened to upgrading from dial-up to cable at your home. The conventional method used to send data back from the ISS has about 200 to 400 Kbps of bandwidth. The lasercom device will be able to provide up to 50 Mbps of speed.

NASA says that in the future a similar deep space laser device will be able to support transmissions from Mars at up to 1 Gbps. The laser will head to the ISS this week aboard the SpaceX Dragon resupply cargo ship – assuming that the rocket overcomes its current launch delay.

OSIRIS-REx Wants to Lasso an Asteroid to Explain Life on Earth

NASA has a plan to better explore how our own local star system, and life within it, got started. It wants to intercept, study, and sample a passing asteroid. The only thing more impressive than this mission’s astronomical level of precision is how the space agency somehow shoehorned "Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer" into a functional acronym.

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SpaceX ISS cargo mission cancelled

SpaceX has been working towards a milestone mission to the International Space Station, where it would deposit cargo including, among other things, a pair of robotic legs. Unfortunately, a last … Continue reading

ISS experiment will beam video to Earth using a laser

NASA is getting ready to conduct its first optical communications experiment aboard the ISS orbiting the Earth. The experiment is called the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science or OPALS. The … Continue reading

Astral Beauty: Gravitational microlensing spots first Exomoon

Astronomers have caught a glimpse of an exomoon for the first time, with a rare space line-up allowing complex telescope tech to catch a never-to-be-repeated sighting. Astral bodies like planets … Continue reading

NASA Veggie project will grow vegetables in the International Space Station

The one thing that Howard Wolowitz of The Big Bang Theory missed during his space mission was eating his greens, joking aside however, there is a grain of truth in … Continue reading

NASA To Test “Flying Saucer”

NASA To Test “Flying Saucer”For all the stories that have gone out concerning a flying saucer or a UFO in the past, don’t you think that it is rather ironic for NASA themselves to be testing out this new ‘flying saucer’? Apparently, such a spacecraft might eventually prove to be the key that unlocks mass travel for humans to land on the surface of the Red Planet, Mars. Known as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD for short, this unique ‘flying saucer’ happens to resemble that of a giant parachute, being specially designed for vehicles which are larger than the Curiosity rover.

Of course, that might also translate to an ability in the future to bring along with it manned spacecraft that could take humans all the way to Mars. There is still plenty of work that needs to be done, however, and tests to run before it can be deem worthy and safe enough to transport human lives into the far reaches of space. Later this June, NASA is expected to send the LDSD into the sky for its maiden ‘test flight’. Hopefully, during NASA’s upcoming tests, there won’t be folks out there who might be fooled into thinking that this is an actual flying saucer with the world as we know it about to get overrun by aliens.

NASA To Test “Flying Saucer” , original content from Ubergizmo, Filed in Transportation, ,



Buying Pieces of the Space Race at Bonhams’ Space History Auction

Buying Pieces of the Space Race at Bonhams' Space History Auction

This week, Bonhams hosted an auction of historical space items in Manhattan. The Space History Sale featured troves of objects and documents, both American and Soviet, dating back to the heyday of the space race. And Gizmodo got the chance to take a peek.

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The craziest NASA test ever is this giant supersonic Goldberg machine

The craziest NASA test ever is this giant supersonic Goldberg machine

NASA is sending new and bigger spaceships to Mars, which means they need bigger supersonic parachutes. So big, in fact, that they don’t fit in any wind tunnel anymore, so their engineers had to find new ways to test them. New crazy ways. Really crazy. In fact, it’s the craziest test they got so far.

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