Having a nibble of astronaut ice cream is a rite of passage for field-tripping American youths, but the reality of subsisting solely on specialty dehydrated vittles with long shelf lives doesn’t have the same kind of novelty in space. NASA has already been developing tactics to fight “menu fatigue
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There’s a small army of adorable
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"Can the foundation for a bright future in aviation and space be built one LEGO brick at a time?" That’s the question NASA asked budding aerospace engineers for "NASA’s Future Missions: Imagine. Invent. BUILD" contest. These are the winning designs.
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IRAS 20324+4057 is a mouthful, and it’s about 4,500 light years away, but it’s also a star on the move. It’s expanding to form a new star, but it’s unclear how massive that new star will be. "Energetic" wind and light is displacing a lot of the gas and dust that would normally go into the "protostar." Depending on how the play between light and gravity resolves (over the next 100,000 years), the star could expand out and eventually develop into a planetary nebula, or could pull matter in and become a massive star. The protostellar nebula is about one light year across. It was imaged by Hubble in 2006, but the photo above was only released recently. Though it’s unclear what will happen, NASA wants to start making predictions using "clever observations and deductions." We can all play a little stellar guessing game. [Astronomy Picture of the Day]
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Yesterday we East Coasters had the chance to see a real life rocket launch
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In the predawn hours of August 28, a NASA video network consisting of five cameras located in the southeast United States recorded a massive fireball. The fireball was a meteor that entered the atmosphere of Earth over the Georgia/Tennessee border at 3:27 AM, moving at a speed of 56,000 mph.
NASA reports that the meteor begin to break apart the skies northeast of Ocoee, Tennessee at an altitude of 33 miles. By the time NASA lost track of the meteor, it had descended to an altitude of 21 miles and slowed to speed of only 19,400 mph. NASA estimates of the rock was about two-feet wide and weighed over 100 pounds.
Even cooler than the gigantic fireball streaking through the Earth’s atmosphere and getting caught on video is the fact that it briefly outshined the moon. Doppler weather radar in the area also reported a rain of meteor fragments falling to the ground east of Cleveland, Tennessee.
I wonder how long before we see this on an episode of Meteorite Men.
[via Space.com]
For the longest time, Floridians had all the fun, getting to see NASA rockets launch into the night sky. Tonight, folks from North Carolina to Maine get to join that club, by watching the first moon mission to launch from NASA’s Wallops Island facility in Virginia. It’s just about as easy as walking outside, but here’s some tips to maximize your chances of seeing it happen, live.
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Oh hey, NASA launched its official Instagram account today. So far it’s all moon-related, anticipating tonight’s launch of the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer
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It’s always interesting when meteors streaked through the atmosphere of the earth creating fiery trails that those of us on Earth can see with the naked eye. These fireballs are relatively rare since most go unseen. However, this week a spectacular fireball was recorded over the American South East and briefly it shine brighter than […]
This is a picture of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) observatory, which is due to launch tomorrow—but it’s spinning fast enough to make you feel really quite sick.
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