Hasta La Gadget!

Normally, rockets are made of a whole bunch of small parts that are intricately attached to each other to form the body that can actually fly into space. If you could build complex geometrical parts out of a single piece of material, however, things would get much easier. That’s where metal powder and lasers come in. More »

We could have had Bin Laden in 1998. However, in the 80 minutes it took for a volley of cruise missiles travel from US ships in the Arabian Gulf over to his training camp in Afghanistan, he had done packed up and left. If those warheads had been riding on the new X-51 hypersonic jet engine, they’d have made his day much worse in just 12 minutes. More »

70mm Hydra rockets have been a mainstay of the US military since the 1940s. They’re less expensive and cause less collateral damage than, say, a Hellfire-sized ordnance. Problem is—they don’t steer well, or rather, at all. A new laser-guidance upgrade from BAE Systems, however, is poised to make the Hydra-70 much agile and much more deadly. More »

NASA has shown just what it can do with the short window of science allowed by its “sounding” or sensor-equipped suborbital rockets — having taken the sharpest pictures ever of the sun’s corona. A 460-pound telescope called the High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) was lofted for about 10 minutes into space, ample time for its mirrors to capture over 150 images of the solar fringe at 16-megapixels each, before parachuting back to earth. The scope shot exclusively in a sun-friendly high ultraviolet range and used innovative new optics consisting of an array of mirrors, allowing it to resolve the sun down to 135 miles. That bested the previous champ, NASA’s own Solar Dynamics Observatory, with almost five times the magnification. For maximum effect, the space agency took advantage of an unusually high amount of solar activity to focus on a large, active sunspot. To see the results in glorious multihued HD, check the video after the break.

Continue reading Visualized: Telescope aboard suborbital NASA rocket takes clearest ever images of sun (video)

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Visualized: Telescope aboard suborbital NASA rocket takes clearest ever images of sun (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s almost Independence Day, which means lots of big, bright, sulfury booms. Even if you’re not planning on checking out a full-fledged fireworks display, you can still make your own little rockets using items you probably have lying around your house. More »