When I was a kid, my brother and I climbed up on a ladder and pocked those glowing stars all over the ceiling in the room we shared. We thought we were cool, but inevitably, the sticky good that held them up failed and we often ended up with stars falling on our heads at night. Over at Instructables a guy has offered up instructions on how to turn your ceiling into your own star field, and it looks cool.
“You’ve more chance of being struck by a meteorite” goes the old saying, making German teen Gerrit Blank either particularly lucky or very unlucky. The fourteen year old was hit on the hand by a falling pea-sized meteorite, apparently traveling at up to 30,000mph and hitting the ground with enough force to produce “an enormous bang like a crash of thunder” and knock Blank off his feet.
Well isn’t this a lovely thought? Apparently, a new study released in Nature shows that Earth and Venus could possibly smash into one another in the future due something called orbital chaos.
Far be it from the US government to prompt fear and stoke the fires of dread, but the Government Accountability Office (GAO) are warning that the GPS system as we know it might fail as soon as 2010. According to their latest report, a delayed overhaul and poor management have led to a lack of new global positioning satellites to replace those at the end of their lifespan.
Ah, science. How you intrigue me. Take for instance what NASA is up to. Their Stratospheric Observatory Infrared Astronomy or SOFIA airborne telescope is nearing its first day on the job (though that’s still three years away) and the device just got its picture taken for all to see.
NASA astronaut Don Pettit has managed to fashion a coffee mug suitable for use in zero-G conditions, during his stay on the International Space Station. Motivated by the less than pleasing experience of drinking coffee through a straw from a sealed pouch, Pettit used a piece of folded plastic to create a teardrop-shaped cup. Surface tension keeps the coffee inside, rather than drifting around and scalding people.
Check out the zero-gravity coffee cup in action after the cut
Wow. This is just plain cool. Apparently, astronomers have successfully taken the first images of planets that fall outside of our solar system. In fact, these planets that orbit stars other than our own, were photographed using new imaging techniques.
For those interested in space and NASA, you’ll most likely be saddened to learn that the Mars Phoenix ends its mission yesterday. Yes, the little robot that found water on the barren planet stopped communicating with Earth yesterday, officially bringing the project to a close.
Interestingly enough, the Mars Phoenix was very connected on the Internet and would offer updates as to its status by means of Twitter. Standard status updates were the typical fare, like when the Phoenix went into safe mode and when it found its solar panels blocked by dust storms.
Can you believe it, folks? NASA started up for business 50 years ago today on October 1, 1958 when the first employees sat down to a day’s work. And even better yet, NASA is still doing what they do best: giving us permission to look to the sky in wonder with a tangible hope of knowing what lies beyond our world.
NASA has done many an impressive thing over the past 50 years. There were the moon landings, the space stations, satellite launches and more. And of course, they have been associated with a few tragedies as well including the Challenger, Columbia and a launchpad fire.
After many blunders, the SpaceX Falcon 1 has reached orbit successfully. The privately-funded rocket program, backed by Elon Musk, has finally been realized after three attempts that failed, resulting in the scattering of “Scotty,” actor James Montgomery Doohan from Star Trek fame’s ashes over the Pacific Ocean and a few explosions.
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