Hasta La Gadget!

This isn’t the first time that NASA has live-streamed a spacewalk, but we certainly don’t get treated to them very often. Today, NASA is live streaming a six-hour spacewalk aboard the International Space Station, as two Russian cosmonauts venture their way out into deep, dark space to fix a broken reflector and install weather monitoring equipment on the exterior of the station.

The spacewalk will last a total of six hours, and it’s going on right now, and you can view what the cosmonauts are seeing thanks to their helmet cameras, and you can also hear the audio transmission between the two cosmonauts and the mission control on the ground, which is pretty neat. Pavel Vinogradov and Roman Romanenko are the two cosmonauts making the spacewalk.

The spacewalkers will be tasked with installing what’s called the Obstanovka experiment on the exterior of the station’s Zvezda service module. The equipment will study plasma waves and the effect of space weather on Earth’s ionosphere. They will also retrieve the Biorisk experiment, which studied the effect of microbes on spacecraft structures.

The cosmonauts will also replace a faulty retro-reflector device, which is just one of the navigational aids that provides assistance to the European Space Agency’s Albert Einstein Automated Transfer Vehicle 4 cargo ship, where it will automatically dock to the space station later in June.

NASA live-streaming six-hour ISS spacewalk right now is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Let’s be honest, everything is more difficult in space than here on Earth. It’s hard enough just to get into space and bring all of the things humans need to survive. It’s an amazing technological feat for astronauts to live and work on the International Space Station in and of itself. What you might not think about is how different actually living in outer space is. Take for instance the simple act of using a washcloth.

A group of students recently suggested an experiment to be conducted on by astronaut Chris Hadfield on the ISS involving nothing more than squirting some water onto a washcloth and wringing it out. As it turns out, even washcloths are cool when NASA buys them. The cloths themselves are compacted down into a little pucks and have to be unraveled.

Since you can’t just have a bucket of water in space, Hadfield uses what looks like a large Capri Sun pouch to squirt water onto the cloth. The water just floats in little globs until it absorbed by the cloth. The result is incredibly cool. The surface tension of the water means that it sticks to the outside of the cloth and oozes between the astronaut’s fingers like some sort of gel.

Check out the video above, it’s probably the coolest thing you’ll see all day.

[via Boing Boing]

While NASA might be working hard to launching its new planet hunting mission in 2017, that doesn’t mean its not using the resources it currently has to discovery new and exciting things in the universe. In a press release today the agency says that it has discovered three new planets that are in the habitable zone. These super Earth sized planets are part of the two new planetary systems they have discovered. Kepler 62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. Kepler 69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c.

Out of these seven planets, three are in the “habitable zone,” which is the range of distance from their suns that they orbit, making surface temperature suitable for the existence of liquid water. These three planets are Kepler 62e, 62f and 69c. Kepler 62f is said to be 40% larger than Earth, which means that it is the only planet known in habitable zone that is closest to the size of our world. Kepler 62e is almost 60% larger than Earth and both of these planets orbit a star that is smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler 69c is said to be 70% larger than earth and it orbits in the habitable zone of a star that is similar to the sun. Scientists are not sure if these planets could host life, but this yet another major step in finding a planet that orbits around a star like our Earth does around the sun.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Nanosuit Paves Survival Route For Insects In Vacuum , LinkedIn iPhone And Android App Updated With New UI,

NASA’s Kepler telescope has discovered three “super-Earth-size” exoplanets that are close enough to their stars to make them possibly suitable for water. Two of the planets (Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f) orbit a K2 dwarf estimated to be around 7 billion years old. Measuring at two-thirds the size of our sun, this cosmic lantern is orbited by a total of five planets, three of which are too close to be habitable for life. Kepler-69c, the biggest of this newly discovered trio is estimated to be 70 percent larger than Earth and takes 242 days to revolve around its sun-like star Kepler-69. While there’s great excitement surrounding these new findings, this isn’t the first time we’ve spotted a potentially habitable planet. A little over a year ago Kepler discovered Kepler-22b, an exoplanet about 600 light-years away from Earth believed to be covered in liquid. Like their predecessor, NASA has yet to determine if these newfound planets actually have water or a rocky composition. Until then, Ridley Scott might want to hold off on naming them as locations for his sequel to Prometheus.

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Via: Wired

Source: NASA

Back in May 1006 AD, a bright star appeared in the sky that was observed and written about by astromers across the globe. Now known as SN 1006, this supernova was detected by modern astronomers back in the 1960s using the very first round of x-ray satellites, which produced a faint image. Fast forward a handful of decades, and thanks to NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory, we now have a bright, detailed image of this ancient supernova.

The SN 1006 supernova was created when a white dwarf star exploded, with Phys.org reporting that it is located approximately 7,000 light years from our planet. Specifically, this particular supernova, which is classified as a Type Ia, resulted from either a merging with another white dwarf, or from the star pulling mass from a companion star, resulting in an explosion beyond any Michael Bay movie.

The image created by NASA’s Chandra was the result of more than 8 days of observation and 10 points of observation. The images at each point were taken in low, medium, and high-energy x-ray snapshot, with each resulting in red, green, and blue colors, respectively. While the image along is interesting, it is also of much relevance to researchers – supernovas such as SN 1006 are used to help figure out how fast the universe is expanding.

The latest image of SN 1006 is the most detailed yet of any Type Ia supernova, and provides the ability to look at other areas concerning this particular white dwarf star’s remnants. For example, researchers have determined that certain material elements are traveling between 7m and 11 million miles per hour outward from the area. Likewise, we might one day see a reconstructed image of what the star looked like.

[via Phys]

NASA x-ray image shows off ancient supernova in fine detail is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.