This amazing picture was taken by Alan Friedman and it shows a side of the Sun that I’ve never seen before. Look at it, I mean, the Sun’s surface looks like milky peach fuzz that’d be so soft to touch—the texture is just incredible. To take the picture, Friedman used: More »
This is how Discovery approached and landed safely on Runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Center, after successfully completing mission STS-133. Everyone loves the Space Shuttle launches, but the landings are quite exciting too—and terrifying, after the Columbia disaster. More »
On February 24, 2011, the space shuttle Discovery launched for the last time ever. Today, twelve days later, it’s back on Earth after a farewell wake up call by Captain Kirk. More »
Model X-37B might look familiar to you — it was the name of an autonomous space vehicle that took flight just about a year ago, orbited for a whopping eight months, and then successfully returned to our planet all by itself. Now a new version of the X-37B has blasted off to hang outside of the atmosphere for a while. The spacecraft left Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 41 down in Florida and hurtled to a low-Earth orbit with help of a Atlas V rocket. Boeing isn’t saying exactly what it’s doing up there, but we suspect this spaceship knows which way to go.
Boeing’s new unmanned X-37B launches into orbit, won’t come home until it finds Major Tom originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The search for intelligent life might get a little bit more direction, thanks to a telescope designed to seek out habitable planets. Data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope is being used as a cosmic GPS to point radio detectors used in the SETI project towards the places in the sky that are most likely to support life.
According to this article by Discovery News, the Kepler telescope has already found 55 stars with planets in habitable areas. SETI is using this data to orient their radio telescopes on the most promising targets, looking for transmissions that might indicate any advanced forms of life.
Taking the data from the small section of the galaxy that Kepler has scanned, scientists estimate that this means there may be roughly 500 million planets capable of sustaining life in the Milky Way. Not only does this mean SETI has some clues to where they should point their telescopes, but the chances of finding anything out there when they do have greatly improved. Kepler’s data shows that between 3 and 10 percent of all stars could potential have an Earth-like planet in their orbit. This number is much larger than previous estimates and, while not significantly altering the way SETI looks for alien life, could make eventual success that much more likely.
Who knows, maybe thanks to SETI and Kepler we’ll end up coming across some alien prime-time TV sooner than we think. They’ll probably be the only channel not covering Charlie Sheen.
[via Discovery News]
NASA has released this beautiful, crystal-clear video of Discovery’s launch. It was taken from an HD camera mounted on the left solid rocket booster, during liftoff of the shuttle for mission STS-133. More »
Simulated Mars mission simulating return to Earth as we speak, astronauts genuinely overjoyed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 18:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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[image via Wikimedia Commons]
Have a few million dollars and a penchant for collecting space-age gadgets? Better head to Sotheby’s in New York City on April 12th. The auction house is selling a 50-year-old Russian space capsule that blasted off just three weeks before the first human did. The Vostok 3KA-2 on the auction block is exactly identical to the Vostok 3KA-3 that carried the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, into Earth’s orbit. In fact, this capsule provided the final test-flight before Gagarin made it into the history books, according to this Reuters article on the sale.
The interior has a not-so-spacious 8 foot diameter constructed out of aluminum alloy, making it a cozy little place to play cosmonaut.
It’s not quite in mint condition, however. The capsule sports burn marks from the hot reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and the equipment in the interior has been removed for what the Russian news service RIA Novosti calls “security reasons”. Still, this Soviet space-race relic is expected to sell anywhere between $2 million and $10 million, not a bad chunk of cash for its anonymous owner.
Even though the spacecraft didn’t carry a person into free-fall around Earth, that doesn’t mean it was entirely without passengers. When it first launched the Vostok 3KA-2 held a mannequin and a dog by the name of Zvezdochka. Both made it safely back to Earth, unharmed by the single orbit the capsule took before landing.
Today, Discovery reached for the stars for the last time in history. The launch almost got canceled because of a last-minute range computer system display problem, but the engineers saved the day a couple of seconds before the launch window deadline. Here’s the video of the launch. More »
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