Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve seen a lot of neat photos from Mars thanks to NASA’s latest Curiosity rover that’s currently putzing its way around the surface of the red planet. The latest imagery that it has sent back is a rather simple, but neat timelapse video of one of Mars’ moons rising into the Martian sky.

The video is simply a timelapse consisting of 86 photos that were taken by Curiosity’s navigation camera, and they were stitched together to create a 30-second timelapse. The set of photos were taken shortly after Mars’ sunset on June 28. The timelapse video shows the moon rising over the course of about 30 minutes.

In the video, you’ll notice how small Phobos appears in the sky, and that’s mostly because it’s just 14 miles in diameter (compared to Earth’s Moon, which is over 2,100 miles in diameter). If you’re wondering about the mysterious ring glow in the video, officials say it’s is an artifact caused by the scattering of light inside the camera.

It’s not much to look at, really, since it just looks like another star in the sky, but it’s definitely unique to witness a moon rising on another planet in our solar system. The photos were taken from Gale Crater, which Curiosity arrived to back in August. The rover is expected to be active for at least another year.

Curiosity has yet to leave Gale Crater, but NASA plans to take it elsewhere in the future. It’s ultimate destination is the base of the mysterious Mount Sharp, which stands at 3.4 miles high. It’s no Mount Everest, but NASA thinks Mount Sharp holds some secrets that the rover could uncover about possible life on Mars.

VIA: Space.com

NASA Curiosity Mars rover records timelapse of Phobos moon rising is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Space is gigantic, so even though we have giant dishes trained to listen to it, we only hear a tiny slice. But scientists manning the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia stumbled on a few blips worth hearing: four mammoth radio blasts that came from far outside the galaxy.

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If you think wriggling into your cycling lycra or trussing yourself up in a tux is tricky, think again. Donning an astronaut’s space suit is no mean feat—as this video shows.

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A few years from now, we might be able to send small satellites into deep space for cheap using a new propulsion system being developed by University of Michigan engineers — assuming they raise enough money via Kickstarter. Called CAT (CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster), it’s designed to propel 10 x 10 x 10 centimeter CubeSat blocks far beyond the planet’s orbit using only solar energy for fuel. Thus far, similar satellites can only orbit the Earth after going along for a ride on current rockets that are larger and more expensive. In the future, CATs could head to the asteroid belt, or even as far as Saturn and Jupiter to investigate water on their moons. The $200,000 its engineers aim to raise (in exchange for your name etched on the golden layer of a spacecraft panel) will go towards the CAT engine’s development and testing. The team could send an experimental thruster to space as soon as 2014 with help from NASA-Ames and Google, with a spacecraft launch targeted for 2015.

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Source: CAT (KickStarter)

Last night, India successfully sent the satellite IRNSS-1A into space on one of its own rockets, making it the first of seven that will provide the country with a GPS-like navigation system. The rocket – called the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle-C22 – was sent into space from the Satish Dhawan Space Center a little before

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