While you’ve been out living your life in the sunshine and open air, scientists watched as six men willingly spent 520 days locked in windowless, steel tubes inside a Moscow warehouse. Results: this group, once cream of the astronaut crop, morphed into sluggish, unmotivated frat dudes. More »
The Death Star’s trash compactor may have been implausible, but it was on the right path towards solving a very real problem: space junk. More »
It looks like brushstrokes – it could almost be a Turner – but this is actually nature at its most dramatic. This snapshot from the European Space Agency’s MERIS satellite shows the Tibesti mountains that straddle northern Chad and southern Libya – though a picture like this makes it easy to forget that borders exist. More »
Interested in buying a 15,000-foot runway? Or maybe a launch pad? It turns out that NASA is quietly planning to lease or sell off a few of its assets at the Kennedy Space Center. A list of items for sale apparently isn’t available yet, but it’s said that Launch Pad 39A, a runway, and the Launch Control Center are up for sale.
If you’re interested in starting your own private space program, talking with NASA about their liquidation sale might be a good start, but of course, you’ll have to have a lot of money in order to get it off the ground (pun intended). Currently, entrepreneur Elon Musk is doing just that with his SpaceX program.
Apparently NASA is wanting to sell their things off quickly before any of the structures fall into a state of disrepair — ideally they want everything sold by the end of 2013, with offers expected to roll in about six months from now. So, if you’re serious about your new space venture, you might be able to snag a bargain or two with some strategic offers.
The process is mostly secret, though, because NASA has agreed to let bidders declare their proposals proprietary and keep them out of the view of competitors and the general public, similar to how a silent auction works, so be prepared to come with your best offers in hand, or else Musk might beat you to the punch.
[via Orlando Sentinel]
Image via Flickr
NASA to hawk space shuttle facilities is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Ever since NASA started wrapping up its space shuttle program, it’s had a lot of extra gear on its hands. The shuttles were sent off to retirement and other assorted equipment was cleaned out of the garage. Now NASA’s game to lease or sell some of the infrastructure that’s still hanging around at the Kennedy Space Center. More »
“Snakes on a Planet?” asks the Mars Curiosity Rover to herself, “no, but this sinuous rock formation I spotted on Mars looks like one.” WHATEVER, Mars Curiosity Rover! I’ve had enough of your lies! More »
By now, we all know that Mars was once home to water and may have even supported life. But what would the planet have looked like when it was lush and verdant? More »
Something never quite added up in the conventional model of solar system formation. It dictates that planets are formed from the accretion disc around a young star, but it also dictates that a star continues to feed off the same material as it grows and matures. So how to both bodies grow using a limited supply of elementary particles? More »
A rock from the Red Planet was discovered in the Sahara desert, and has been under study for the last year. The results from the study show that it is different from other Martian rocks that have been discovered, in that it contains more water and is older than the majority of other discoveries. The finding has been named NWA 7034, is said to be 2.1 billion years old, and offers a glimpse into Mars’ history.
Perhaps easier to remember, the rock is being referred to as Black Beauty, and was given to the University of New Mexico after being acquired in Morocco. It’s not the first rock from Mars to be found in the Sahara desert, and certainly isn’t the oldest, with that title going to a rock estimated to be 4.5 billion years old. Of the 65 or so rocks that have been found in the Sahara, most of them are younger than 600 million years.
A team at the University of New Mexico studied Black Beauty over the course of a year, during which they confirmed its Martian origins via its chemical makeup, and that it formed via a volcanic eruption. Likewise, it released a very small yet significant 6,000 parts per million of water when heated, which trumps the amount from other Martian rocks. The rock itself was relatively uncontaminated, it is being reported, and wasn’t terribly altered by Earth’s weather.
The study’s head at the University of New Mexico Carl Agee offered this statement. “Here we have a piece of Mars that I can hold in my hands. That’s really exciting … Having this sample from 2 billion years ago may give us a little bit of a glimpse of what the surface conditions were like [during the transition period when Mars went from warm and wet to cold and dry].”
[via Associated Press]
Unique Martian rock found in the Sahara desert is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Our solar system is positioned near the edge of the Milky Way. It’s a nice part of town, sure, but it doesn’t allow for a very clear view of the rest of the galaxy. That’s prevented us from studying many of the Milky Way’s fundamental aspects, like whether it has two arms or four, how big it is, how fast it’s moving, and whether we’re someday going to ram headfirst into the Andromeda galaxy. More »
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