Oct 25
Oct 24
Star Citizen, the upcoming space-based MMO from Roberts Space Industries, has reached its Kickstarter funding goal of $500,000, and it still has 26 days left to go. Star Citizen features the work of Chris Roberts, the infamous designer behind classics such as Wing Commander and Privateer. Roberts is making a comeback into the video game industry with Star Citizen.
It’s important to note that Star Citizen’s Kickstarter campaign is merely just a secondary funding location for the development project. The game’s official website has already earned around $1.35 million from donors, meaning that the project has now earned roughly $1.85 million in total. The project’s goal is to $2 million, which shouldn’t be too hard to do at this point.
The game’s official website has 16 days left to go before they close donations, and its Kickstarter campaign has 26 days left to go as previously mentioned. Coming up with just a measly $150,000 in that amount of time shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the Chris Roberts and the rest of the development team.
Just a couple weeks ago, the funding project reached the $500,000 mark, so it’s amazing to see how much money that has been raised since then. Based on how much cash that the project has already raised, I’d be surprised if the total amount donated didn’t exceed $2.5 million or even $3 million, but we’ll have to wait and see what Roberts and the gang end up with in 26 days.
Star Citizen reaches $500,000 Kickstarter goal is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Oct 24
You are looking at more than 84 million stars, the largest ever catalogue of the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Astronomers at the Paranal Observatory in Cerro Paranal, Chile, stitched the 9 gigapixels of the original image from thousands of individual infrared pictures.You can see the full, zoomable version here. More »
Oct 23
Astronomers have discovered a gigantic extended jet of cosmic material that is traveling at near the speed of light emerging from a distant galaxy. The massive galactic emission is coming from a quasar that formed approximately 6,000,000,000 years ago called PKS 0637-752. The gigantic emission shines with the power of 10 trillion suns.
The scientists believe that PKS 0637-752 is an early galaxy with a supermassive black hole in its center. That black hole spins gas and dust falling into around in a fashion similar to water going down a bathtub drain. The researchers say that the spiraling motion accelerates charged particles causing them to put out huge amounts of radiation.
The image seen above was taken using the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array radio telescope located in New South Wales Australia. The image shows radio wavelengths of the massive jet of particles. One of the most interesting aspects of the photograph is the dot-like structure of the massive jet.
The structures are known as knots and scientists don’t understand them well. The knots are believed to represent sections of the jet separated by an area of 160,000 to 360,000 light years each. The pattern is said to resemble an afterburner pattern from a jet here on Earth known as “shock diamonds.” The pattern suggests that the jet of material spewing from the quasar is periodically turning on or off or some sort of shockwave is causing the knots.
[via Wired]
Massive galactic emission spans 2 million light years is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Oct 23
NASA and commercial partner Blue Origin have announced that the company has conducted a successful pad escape test as of October 19 at the Blue Origin West Texas launch site. Blue Origin was able to fire its pusher-escape motor and launch a full-scale suborbital crew capsule from the simulated propulsion module. The test was part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Blue Origin is a NASA Commercial Crew Development Round 2 participant and the Space Act Agreement funded the work. The goal of the program is to develop and deliver a reliable US commercial crew space transportation system providing safe, reliable, and cost-effective access to the ISS and low-Earth orbit. Once testing and development of commercial crew modules is complete and approved, NASA will contract with private companies to transport astronauts into space.
During the test, the suborbital crew capsule travels to an altitude of 2307 feet. Once at that altitude three parachutes were deployed and the crew capsule floated to a soft landing 1630 feet away from the simulated propulsion module. The pusher escape system was developed by Blue Origin to allow a crew capsule escape in the event of an emergency during any phase of ascent for the company’s suborbital New Shepherd system.
The results of the test will be used to shape the design of the escape system for the company’s planned space vehicle. The system Blue Origin has developed is expected to allow full reusability of the launch vehicle, which is different from previous NASA systems. The escape systems used during the Mercury and Apollo programs required NASA to jettison the unused escape system. By reusing the escape system in future flights the cost of putting astronauts and cargo into space is cheaper.
Blue Origin successfully completes NASA pad escape test is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Oct 22
A Tour of Astrobotic Technology’s lunar rover lab at Carnegie Mellon (video)
Posted in: Today's Chili 
Things are buzzing late Monday afternoon at Carnegie Mellon’s Planetary Robotics Lab Highbay. Outside, in front of the garage door-like entrance, a trio of men fills up a kiddie pool with a garden hose. Just to their left, an Enterprise rent-a-truck backs up and a handful of students raise two metal ramps up to its rear in order to drive a flashy rover up inside. I ask our guide, Jason Calaiaro, what the vehicle’s final destination is. “NASA,” he answers, simply. “We have a great relationship with NASA, and they help us test things.”
Calaiaro is the CIO of Astrobotic Technology, an offshoot of the school that was founded a few years back, thanks to Google’s Lunar X Prize announcement. And while none of the handful of vehicles the former student showcases were made specifically with the government space agency in mind, given the company’s history of contractual work, we could well see them receive the NASA stamp of approval in the future. Asked to take us through the project, Calaiaro tells us, quite confidently, that the trio of vehicles behind us are set to “land on the moon in 2015,” an ambitious goal set to occur exactly three weeks from last Friday.
Continue reading A Tour of Astrobotic Technology’s lunar rover lab at Carnegie Mellon (video)
Filed under: Robots, Science, Alt
A Tour of Astrobotic Technology’s lunar rover lab at Carnegie Mellon (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Oct 22
It’s rare enough to see a meteorite and its resulting fireball streaking through the atmosphere. What’s even more rare is for the meteorite to cause a giant fireball in the sky witnessed by multiple people and then to have enough of that meteorite survive the fiery entrance to the Earth’s atmosphere to strike the ground. Even rarer still is for that fragment meteorite to hit a home and be recovered.
Last week, a meteor was spied in the skies over the San Francisco Bay area. A San Francisco Bay resident named Lisa Webber found the small two-inch chunk of meteorite you see in the photo above in her yard. The meteorite fragment struck the roof of her home three days before she found it. Webber said that she heard the meteorite fragment hit the roof of her home, but didn’t think anything about the sound until she heard news reports of a meteorite exploding over the Bay Area.
Since discovering the chunk of meteorite, scientist Peter Jenniskens from the Seti Institute in Mountain View California has confirmed that the piece of rock is indeed debris from the meteor that streaked through the skies in the San Francisco Bay area last Wednesday. Jenniskens says that finding the piece of meteorite is significant because it will allow scientists to create a trajectory and trace the path to the meteorite’s origins in the asteroid belt.
Webber had used a magnet to determine if the chunk of rock she found in her yard might be a meteorite. It appears that the small chunk of rock impacted the roof of her home hard enough to leave a charred mark on the roof. Tiny pieces of meteorite can be valuable to collectors, but it’s unclear what Webber plans to do with the meteorite she discovered.
[via SFGate]
Tiny meteorite fragment strikes home in San Francisco Bay area is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Oct 22
This amazing video shows a NASA-created simulation of the entire life of a single disk galaxy—all the way from the Big Bang 13.5 billion years ago to the present time. More »
Oct 20
Tonight—actually very early tomorrow morning—the 2012 Orionid meteor shower is going to reach its peak, lighting up the sky with some shooting stars. You can take your chances outside, but if you want the best view, NASA can hook you up. More »
Oct 19
SpaceX have published this neat interactive panorama of the inside of their Dragon capsule, America’s first private spacecraft. More »
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