Hasta La Gadget!

SETI’s best known for its search for sentient life in the cosmos, but when the Hubble space telescope found a pair of new moons orbiting Pluto (at SETI’s behest), it decided to do some planetoid naming, too. Today, SETI announced those names: Styx and Kerberos. The institute didn’t grant titles to the moons itself, however. Instead, it put the onus on the public to come up with the proper names — with instructions from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) that the nomenclature have something to do with the mythological underworld known as Hades. Voting lasted for two weeks, and SETI received over 450,000 regular votes and around 30,000 write-ins. Though many wished for the moons to be named for Stephen Colbert or the Romulan home world, the IAU found those choices to be unfit for the new moons. Instead, we have Styx (the river that separates earth from the underworld) and Kerberos (the three-headed dog that serves as the guardian to Hades) — who said studying Classics was a waste of time?

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Source: SETI Institute

A unmanned Russian Proton-M rocket exploded moments after leaving the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today, destroying its payload of three satellites intended for Russia’s Glonass GPS system. Fortunately nobody was injured, but local news service Interfax is reporting that nearly 500 tons of fuel from the craft has contaminated the crash site. There’s no word on what caused the disaster, but this model’s recent history is fraught with equipment failures — so if you’d like to see the latest disaster (spoiler: explosions), the video resides after the jump.

Filed under: GPS, Science

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Via: The Verge

Source: RIA, BBC

Ever since NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft entered Saturn’s orbit in 2004, filmmaker Stephen van Vuuren has been enthralled with its progress. So much so that he’s spent years collecting over a million insanely high-res photos from Cassini’s mission and quilted them together into a 45-minute film called In Saturn’s Rings. Without relying on CGI or fancy visual effects, van Vuuren has patched together a seamless visual journey through our solar system, culminating in a breathtaking view of Saturn’s rings and moons. Distributed by BIG & Digital, the movie is expected to make its way to IMAX theaters sometime in 2014, though there’s no word yet on a specific release date. The first official trailer dropped today, and you can watch it — in 4K if you’ve got the right screen — after the break.

Filed under: Misc, Alt

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Source: In Saturn’s Rings

Doctor Who has become sort of like an icon among his many fans, with the show inspiring a whole range of products and mods, like the Doctor Who wall clock, Dalek planter, and TARDIS bunk bed.

A Kickstarter campaign inspired by the show was recently successfully funded, but it’s not for another Doctor Who-themed product. Instead, it’s a campaign that will be sending a real-life TARDIS into space – as cargo on a commercial satellite launch.

The 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is coming up (it’s on November 23rd) and what better way to commemorate the event than by sending the Doctor’s space and time machine into orbit?

The miniature TARDIS satellite has already been built and it’s equipped with a GoPro Hero 3 which will be recharged by solar panels (hidden in the police booth windows) that have been set up to provide it with power indefinitely. The team behind the launch hopes to get some nice photos of Earth from orbit, and they’re offering data space on the TARDIS as rewards for the backers of the campaign.

It’s about time someone made this happen! Now they just need to figure out how to get it to work as a time machine.

[via Dvice]

The North Pole is just at the top of the Earth, right? Well, not really: there isn’t really a ‘top’ of a sphere spheroid and, anyway, depending on how you measure things the pole can be in one of many different spots. So which one’s right?

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