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August 04 2011
No Shuttle? No Biggie! NASA’s New Astronauts are LEGO People
The future of manned spaceflight, it’s not. We hope.
Ever since the Space Shuttle took its last flight earlier this summer, the US has had no real plan for getting humans back up in space. Meanwhile, NASA is sending three LEGO figurines to Jupiter tomorrow, as part of a sponsorship deal with LEGO “to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” Because flying little plastic Jupiter, Juno, and Galileo more than 1,700 million miles is a great way to demonstrate to future scientists the importance of funding!
The figurines of the god, goddess, and seventeenth-century astronomer aren’t part of any of the scientific experiments also making the journey on NASA’s Juno probe. But, the press release is quick to note, “Of course, the miniature Galileo has his telescope with him on the journey.” Too bad he has no eyes.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/KSC
June 27 2011
Fore! NASA Golf Game Lets You Frolick on Saturn’s Moons
This takes location golfing to a new level.
If 18 holes on Kauai or Tenerife is old hat, grab your clubs and head to Saturn’s moons.
The NASA team behind the Cassini orbiter periodically release troves of gorgeous images of Saturn and its dozens of moons, revealing the gouges on Enceladus and the lakes of Titan. The drool-worthy vistas just beg to be explored, and you can now do just that with a nifty little Flash game the team has developed called Golf Sector 6. The game takes players through several 9-hole courses across a variety of Saint-Exupéry-esque moons, whose cratered surfaces are patched together from Cassini’s images. As Saturn drifts by in the background, you can relax, put your feet up, and bat a small pink ball toward the hole with your mouse. But beware of that pesky escape velocity: it’s different on every moon, and it’s way, way less than Earth’s.
The trick of the game is getting used to the gravity of each of these moons. While the team has made some sacrifices in accuracy for the sake of playability—Saturn’s pull on the moons’ gravitational fields is excluded, as is ...
February 17 2011
Japan Wants to Send a Tweeting Companion-Bot to the Space Station
It’s official: The robots are taking over the space station.
It will start with Robonaut 2, the humanoid maintenance bot that NASA is sending to the International Space Station next week. And now Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to send its own bot to the ISS. JAXA’s humanoid robot will not only talk and Twitter, but it will also act as a space nurse, monitoring the health of the astronauts.
The researchers behind the project say the bot would have a number of attributes that would make it a valuable crew member. For example, they say, it would never have to sleep–so it could keep watch when the flesh and blood astronauts are in dreamland.
And then there are its conversational skills, which would make it a lively companion for those lonley spacefarers. “We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts,” JAXA’s Satoshi Sano told the AP.
Finally, the bot could take up that crutial task: manning a Twitter feed. The researchers note that NASA’s bot has a Twitter feed, but ...
November 15 2010
How Not to Get a Flat on the Moon: Use a Spring-Packed Super Tire
Future Mars rovers or moon buggies might be riding the wings of Goodyear spring-based tires. This high-tech tire just won a 2010 R&D 100 award, also known as the “Oscar of Innovation,” from the editors of R&D magazine.
The tire was invented last year in a joint effort between NASA and Goodyear, and was tested out on NASA’s Lunar Electric Rover at the Rock Yard at the Johnson Space Center. The spring tire builds upon previous versions of the moon tire, and the improvements enable it to take larger (up to 10 times) rovers up to 100 times further, NASA scientists explained to Gizmag:
“With the combined requirements of increased load and life, we needed to make a fundamental change to the original moon tire,” said Vivake Asnani, principal investigator for the project at NASA’s Glenn Research Centre in Cleveland. “What the Goodyear-NASA team developed is an innovative, yet simple network of interwoven springs that does the job. The tire design seems almost obvious in retrospect, as most good inventions do.”
The tire is made up of 800 helical springs, which simulate the flexibility of an air-filled tire. Because there are so many springs, the tire can’t completely fail all at once, like a punctured air-filled tire would, Asnani said in the Goodyear press release:
“A hard impact that might cause a pneumatic tire to puncture and deflate would only damage one of the 800 load bearing springs. Along with having this ultra-redundant characteristic, the tire has a combination of overall stiffness yet flexibility that allows off-road vehicles to travel fast over rough terrain with relatively little motion being transferred to the vehicle.”
Tires used for off-world adventures have to be durable. Goodyear’s engineers note that the moon’s lack of atmosphere leaves the tires open to a beating from unfiltered solar radiation, which would degrade traditional rubber (meaning more flat tires in a world without roadside assistance). The flexible spring-based tire is well suited to the lunar surface, Jim Benzing, Goodyear’s lead on the project, told Gizmag:
“The spring design contours to the surface on which it’s driven to provide traction. But all of the energy used to deform the tire is returned when the springs rebound. It doesn’t generate heat like a normal tire.”
The tire might also be useful on earth–perhaps on military vehicles where flats can be dangerous.
Related content:
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80beats: Spirit Doesn’t Return NASA’s Calls; Rover Might Be Gone for Good
80beats: Spirit Serendipity: Stuck Rover Stumbles Upon Evidence of Water
80beats: James Cameron to Design a 3D Camera for Next-Gen Mars Rover
Image: Goodyear
October 21 2010
Want to Watch a Mars Rover Being Built? There’s a Webcam for That
Want to see your tax dollars at work? There’s a more exciting way to do it than watching a road crew pour asphalt for the latest highway expansion. Now you can watch the next Mars rover being built in a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thanks to a well-positioned webcam.
Curiosity rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, is a hulking beast compared to its smaller cousins, Spirit and Opportunity. The six-wheeled Curiosity is about the size of a car and weighs 2,000 pounds. The rover is scheduled to blast off toward Mars in the winter of 2011, and to reach the planet in August 2012. Its mission: to probe rocks, take pictures, and generally cruise around looking for signs of life, past or present.
The “Curiosity Cam” went live today. It will typically show technicians working from 8 in the morning until 11 at night, Monday through Friday, but the bunny suit-clad engineers sometimes disappear from the shot when their work draws them to other parts of the building. (During their lunch break today one commenter groused that it was boring to stare at an empty room.) Right now the technicians are working on the rover’s instruments, tomorrow they’re scheduled to put the suspension system and wheels on. Be sure to tune in!
Related Content:
80beats: It’s Alive! NASA Test-Drives Its New Hulking Mars Rover, Curiosity
80beats: James Cameron to Design a 3D Camera for Next-Gen Mars Rover
80beats: Spirit Doesn’t Return NASA’s Calls; Rover Might Be Gone for Good
80beats: Mars Rover Sets Endurance Record: Photos From Opportunity’s 6 Years On-Planet
Image: NASA / JPL
October 15 2010
NASA and Etsy Team Up to Get Their Space Craft(ing) On
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September 03 2010
Undergrads Destroy NASA Satellite
On August 30th, after seven years gathering data on ice sheets and sea ice dynamics, a NASA satellite met its fiery end in the Earth’s atmosphere before plunging into the sea. And it was University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates plotted the satellite’s fatal course.
Happily this wasn’t the result of a Hacking 101 class gone awry, or a particularly sophisticated prank. The students’ destructive mission had NASA’s full endorsement.
NASA decommissioned the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat in July, before turning the show over to the students, who worked with experts from the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
Students and faculty at the Laboratory control four other satellites for NASA and have also operated ICESat during its life, allowing the satellite to measure polar sea ice thickness, the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the heights of vegetation canopies and clouds. Even if the students were old pros at satellite steering, the chance to crash these multimillion dollar craft is rare–the last NASA satellite reentered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2002 and NASA did the job themselves.
After seven-day work weeks computing the satellite’s location and predictions for NASA tracking stations, the students transmitted the satellite’s final course and told it burn all remaining fuel. As Popular Science reports, its charred remains safely splashed down in the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia on Monday. Please tell me someone in that control room made an explosion noise.
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Image: Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado
August 23 2010
Space Shuttle Competitions: Make Astronaut Music, Bring a Shuttle Home
How do we say goodbye? As the Space Shuttle program comes to a 2011 close, NASA has announced two shuttle-related music competitions. Also museums are already lining up like Black Friday shoppers to get their hands on one of those soon-to-be retired vehicles.
In a contest dubbed the “American Idol for space,” NASA invites musicians to create an original song to compliment the STS-134 mission, and asks them to submit their musical stylings online by January 10, 2011. After a NASA panel picks a set of finalists, website visitors can vote for the winner. The top two songs will play during the final shuttle flight in February 2011.
Another ongoing competition asks the public to choose from a top 40 list of previous “wake-up songs”–music used to help astronauts rise from their orbiting slumbers. Selections include the theme from Star Trek (old school version), Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” and U2’s “Beautiful Day.” The top two will play during the STS-133 mission scheduled for this November.
Museums are also entering into a competition of sorts to snatch up a shuttle. The retired shuttles will be free, as The Wall Street Journal reports, but museums must pay shipping and handling totaling around $28.8 million dollars per vehicle, must have a jumbo jet landing strip nearby for delivery, and should have a clear path to an indoor site for display, since the museums cannot disassemble the vehicles.
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum already has dibs on the fleet’s oldest shuttle, Discovery, but Atlantis and Endeavour are up for grabs. The Smithsonian has also graciously offered to give its current prototype Enterprise to another museum once it gets the real deal.
Smithsonian shuttle curator Valerie Neal told The Wall Street Journal that the museum has asked NASA to keep Discovery as complete as possible, including space toilets, for posterity’s sake:
“Who knows . . . Maybe one day we’ll have some extraterrestrials come here to look at our space history.”
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Image: NASA
July 07 2010
Sorry, NASA: Discover Blogger Almost Destroyed Your Moon Colony
I spent some fifteen minutes on the moon yesterday. It wasn’t pretty. A meteor strike knocked out my base’s life support; I crashed a robot into a NASA supply shed; and, while I fiddled around with a welding torch, a gas line exploded.
Moonbase Alpha, the first of two commercial-quality online games that NASA has just developed, taught me a lot: how a solar panel-powered life-support system might work, what “regolith processing” really means, and the weird gait I’d have if I tried to sprint on the lunar surface. Perhaps it also taught me that I’m not cut out to be an astronaut, but maybe I’ll try multiplayer mode before making that decision.
The game, released yesterday on Valve’s Steam video game network, imagines the year 2020 when we have the meager start of a lunar base near Shackleton crater, not far from the Moon’s south pole. A meteor strike disables the base’s life-support (it’s not just me) and one or more players must get it running again in about 25 minutes.
This requires an understanding the base’s systems as well as building and maneuvering (or racing…) your own robots into areas too dangerous for humans. The game is a project launched by NASA’s Learning Technologies program and is a proof-of-concept meant to see if a video game can inspire youth interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
I’m not sure how more expert gamers will feel, but my geeky heart leap when I saw the animated NASA logo in the game’s opening credits–not to mention the lunar footprints left behind on my trail of destruction.
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June 11 2010
Crushed-Out Man Stole Sally Ride’s Flight Suit
Walking by a replica of Sally Ride’s flight suit during visits to NASA and Space Center Houston, Calvin Dale Smith would snicker. Later, he told his wife that he knew the location of Ride’s original flight suit. He didn’t tell her that it was in their home, in a duct tape-wrapped suitcase.
As Wired reports, Smith allegedly got his hands on Ride’s flight suit while working as a contractor at Boeing’s Flight Group Processing Office, which maintains the suits. During his time there, he also stole a NASA Omega watch and several machined spaceship parts (including a safety tether and airlock parts).
According to court documents (pdf), Smith’s wife turned in her husband, who had previously served jail time for domestic violence, after being asked to send her estranged husband his belongings. He wanted a suitcase, “the suitcase.”
Though the first American woman in space’s blue jumpsuit is estimated to fetch $2,500 if sold to the public and $3,500 at an open auction, Smith apparently, according to a local KHOU TV news report, wanted the suit because of a “crush” on the astronaut. A rejection letter found with the suit also shows an unsuccessful attempt to sell it to the Smithsonian.
According to Wired, Smith pleaded not guilty on May 27. He has a July 12 court date and, if convicted, could serve 10 years in jail. Closing KHOU TV’s report: “If convicted, Smith’s obsession with Sally is taking him on a Ride, to Federal Prison.”
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Image: NASA
May 28 2010
Dang, What Was That? Astronomers Wonder What Just Whizzed by Earth
Momma always said to pick up after yourself. Otherwise, you won’t know where your old pieces of junk will end up, and might end up confusing them with asteroids.
Astronomers have decided that a near-Earth object that passed by Earth last week is likely a rocket piece, a chunk of metal left behind in the darkness of space while some orbiter or NASA explorer zoomed off on an exciting mission.
Richard Kowalski at the Catalina Sky Survey discovered “2010 KQ,” a few-meter-wide something or other, headed for Earth on May 16. Tracked by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called “Spaceguard,” the something made a relatively close pass to our planet (it was just a bit further out than the moon’s orbit) on May 21. Yesterday, NASA announced that the object was likely the upper-stage of a rocket.
Why the confusion? First, using spectral analysis, astronomers could see that the object’s makeup was not like any known asteroid. Second, the folks at NASA were suspicious of the object’s path, which looked a lot like our own planet’s orbit around the sun. Things that start moving with us, unless overcome by gravity or propelled by rockets, tend to want keep on going the same way.
“The orbit of this object is very similar to that of the Earth, and one would not expect an object to remain in this type of orbit for very long,” said Paul Chodas, a scientist at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. [NASA]
This isn’t the first such asteroid identity crisis. Astronomers had a similar mix-up regarding 2010 AL30, which made a pass by Earth in January of this year. Scientists debated whether it was a piece of the Venus Express spacecraft, but decided to define it as a “Apollo class” asteroid. You can look at its orbit here.
Astronomers expect for 2010 KQ to visit our neighborhood again in 2036, but there is only a six percent chance that it will actually hit us. Even if it does, it will completely burn up in our atmosphere/trash incinerator.
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Image: NASA/JPL
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