Hasta La Gadget!

Tonight will mark the first opportunity in two years for star gazers to catch a glimpse of a total lunar eclipse. Weather permitting, the eclipse should be visible for upwards of 1.5 billion people–those in North and South America and parts of Europe, Asia, Hawaii, and New Zealand will get a chance to glimpse the cosmic event.

The shadow of the eclipse will fall on the moon at around 1:33 AM EST tonight/tomorrow morning. Prime viewing will occur between 2:41 and 3:53 AM EST. By 5:01 AM, the eclipse will be gone. The mid-totality moment will occur at 8:17 UT/3:17 a.m. EST/12:17 a.m. PST.

Unlike the tricky pinhole viewing of solar eclipses, you’ll actually be able to look at this one–heck, bring a pair of binoculars or a telescope, if they’re handy. Another total lunar eclipse won’t be visible in the US until April 2014.

For more information on the Eclipse’s stages, check out Space.com. 

As it turns out, the Universe may not be all that universal.

Everything we know and can see may be but one tapioca ball in a gigantic cosmic bubble tea. That is just one of the possibilities that can be inferred from data collected from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

Some background on the cosmic background: When using a traditional optical telescope to look between the stars, the far ends of the observable Universe appear pitch black. However, if you were to switch to a radio telescope, a faint ripply background glow is detected emanating from all directions. This is the CMB (which is strongest in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum, thus the name).

The CMB is often described as the residual energy leftover after the Big Bang. It also represents the farthest observable boundaries of our Universe (and the farthest back in time). Scientists have no direct way to detect what, if anything, is beyond.

However, one guess of what is lies beyond is the theory of “eternal inflation.” Eternal Inflation hypothesizes that our universe is just one fixture of a larger multiverse. The theory speculates that our universe as being a bubble that exists in a larger void among other self-contained universii (other universes which may even follow radically different laws of physics).

If this theory is true, cosmologists might expect to see “bruises” in the CMB where our universe bumped into others. According to a recent report from a team at the University College London, they may have discovered just that, and maybe even as many as four colossal brush-ups. The paper [PDF here] is based on data collected from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP), which has been collecting data from the far reaches of the (known) Universe for the past decade.

However, since no one knows exactly what a cosmos-sized bruise might look like, this remains, for now, just a very intriguing theory. However, scientists are hopeful that a more detailed dataset will come from the European Space Agency’s ongoing Planck mission which launched in 2009.

Crazy.

via PopSci, image credit: ESA/ LFI & HFI Consortia

It’s been cruising space for 33 years, for a total of almost 11 billion miles, and now the Voyager 1 is close to hitting a major milestone.. NASA announced this week that, in four years, the spacecraft will leave the end of our solar system.

The probe has been at the mercy of solar winds since 2004, being bombarded by charged particles traveling at one million miles an hour. The speeds of the winds have since slowed to zero, leading scientists to believe that the craft is now headed toward the end of the solar system.

“It’s telling us the heliopause is not too far ahead,” NASA project scientist Edward Stone said in a statement. The heliopause is the area of space where the sun’s solar winds are no longer strong enough to push against the wind of other surrounding stars.

Did you know that it takes nearly seven and a half million pounds of thrust to get a Space Shuttle off the ground and into the final frontier? NASA opts to generate that power by burning through 1,000 gallons of liquid propellants and 20,000 pounds of solid fuel every second, which as you might surmise, makes for some arresting visuals. Thankfully, there are plenty of practical reasons why NASA would want to film its launches (in slow motion!), and today we get to witness some of that awe-inspiring footage, replete with a silky voiceover explaining the focal lengths of cameras used and other photographic minutiae. It’s the definition of an epic video, clocking in at over 45 minutes, but if you haven’t got all that time, just do it like us and skip around — your brain will be splattered on the wall behind you either way.

Continue reading NASA’s Space Shuttle launch videos are spectacularly incredible, incredibly spectacular

NASA’s Space Shuttle launch videos are spectacularly incredible, incredibly spectacular originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Took ’em long enough, don’tcha think? After talking things up for years (and getting dangerously close to pulling the trigger in mid-2008) NASA has finally ejected a solar sail into space. But that’s not the kicker — it managed to eject NanoSail-D from a microsatellite, dubbed FASTSAT. We’re told that this “is the first time NASA has mounted a P-POD on a microsatellite to eject a cubesat,” and sure enough, things have gone swimmingly ever since the mission began on Friday. Aside from giving NASA the ability to test out the effectiveness of using a solar sail in orbit, this also proves that FASTSAT is a “cost-effective independent means of placing cubesat payloads into orbit safely” — that’s according to Mark Boudreaux, FASTSAT project manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Moreover, the NanoSail flight results could lead to new methods of de-orbiting space debris in the future, not to mention get more and more of ’em there to begin with at a lower overall cost and with far less hassle.

NASA successfully launches NanoSail-D solar sail from microsatellite in space originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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