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Tag Archives: NASA
It’s big, it’s temperate; it’s a normal planet: CoRoT-9b
To-date a little more than 400 planets outside of our Solar System have been discovered. A new planet has just been added to the list, CoRoT-9b, and it’s special. It’s a big planet, a gas giant like Jupiter and Saturn. However, its orbit is close to the star (unlike Jupiter and Saturn) so it has [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged CoRoT Satellite, CoRoT-7b, CoRoT-9b, ESA, exoplanet, gas giant, planet, solar system Leave a comment
Life under an Antarctic glacier
Suppose you’re standing on a glacier in Antarctica, twelve miles (19 km) from the sea, and you drill a hole in the ice to get a core sample. Down about 600 feet (180 meters), you hit a little bit of water, and you think, “It’s unfrozen water. Could be something living in this – a [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged Antarctica, astrobiology, Enceladus, Europa, extremophiles, glacier, life Leave a comment
Update: More Moon water
Last year, in a flurry of “NASA Bombs Moon!” stories, the NASA LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) project deliberately crashed into a deeply shadowed crater to kick up dust and test its contents – looking particularly for water. They found it. [SciTechStory: On the Moon or elsewhere follow the water] The quantities found [...]
Posted in News: Space Exploration Also tagged Chandrayaan, craters, exploration, LCROSS, Moon, Moon base, north pole, satellite, water, water-ice Leave a comment
Spaceport America, not far from Truth or Consequences
If you think that U.S. President Obama’s new initiative for space – not only for NASA, but also for the nascent private space industry – is a chimera, well, check out this article in the New York Times: A New Exit to Space Readies for Business. The article, with tongue moving quickly from cheek to [...]
Posted in Spun Also tagged entrepreneur, launch, orbit, private orbiters, rocket, space, Spaceport America Leave a comment
New satellite to spot solar weather
A new eye on space weather, or more specifically the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), is about to be lofted into orbit by NASA (USA). The satellite is a sign of the burgeoning field of ‘space weather,’ which in our region of the solar system essentially means ‘solar weather.’ The new observatory satellite is to orbit [...]
Posted in News: Scientific Instruments Also tagged radiation, SDO, solar storms, solar weather, Sun Leave a comment
To the Moon with reservations
The year is 1966. NASA is preparing the Apollo astronauts for a landing on the Moon. No opportunity to have realistic Moon-like experiences is too cumbersome or expensive, so the astronauts are trucked out to the desert near Tuba City in Arizona. They go a batch at a time to bake their spacesuits and wander [...]
Robonaut2 – Flexible, stronger, human compatible
Androids, robots that look like and sometimes act like humans, are not (just) a figment of star treks in galaxies far far away. This one (below) is built by General Motors (U.S.) for NASA and is called, drolly, Robonaut2 or just R2. It’s been in the works for ten years. R2 is designed to be, [...]
The U.S. in space: Moon, out. Commerce, in.
It’s not like the United States is the only game in space. It wasn’t even the only country with a Moon project. China and Russia both made noises about going to the Moon with men (or women). Still, the U.S. was the pioneer on the Moon – the Apollo Project, “One giant step for mankind…”, [...]
Posted in Essay Also tagged Apollo Program, Cassini, Constellation Program, Kepler, Moon, space Leave a comment
New Report: Get real about asteroids hitting Earth
It has been said, and said more often these days, that humanity is good at dealing with trouble in the here-and-now; and terrible at dealing with disaster in the future. Consider the response to the Haiti earthquake on one hand, and the just released report from the National Research Council (USA), Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth [...]
Synthetic muscle restores the blink of an eye
When you flex your muscles, the muscle cells contract or expand under neurological stimulus (nerve impulses). Something similar happens with a relatively new material called a dialectric electroactive polymer when it is used to create an electroactive polymer artificial muscle (EPAM). Don’t let the lengthy jargon be confusing. The principle is fairly simple, much like [...]
Posted in News: Synthetic Biology Also tagged dialectric, electroactive, EPAM, eye muscles, polymer, synthetic organs Leave a comment
Russians plan asteroid diversion
Nazdrovia! Nothing like starting off 2010 with a little talk of Armageddon (the movie). Rumors were flying around the Internet just before the New Year that the Russians are planning a mission to divert the asteroid 99942 Apophis away from Earth collision.
Fossil evidence in Mars meteorite revisited, or, IT was LIFE!!!
When the 13,000 year-old Alan Hills (ALH84001) meteorite was first analyzed back in 1996 it caused a sensation. LIFE had existed on Mars!!! The media played the story, of course. Unfortunately, the evidence for fossilized organisms in the meteorite was inconclusive, that is, it could be interpreted in different ways. Most scientists decided that what [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Also tagged ALH84001, bacteria, exogenous life, fossils, life on Mars, Mars Leave a comment
NASA re-creates key component of RNA
What happens to water-ice on a comet passing through a zone of intense ultraviolet radiation? If the water-ice contains any molecules of pyrimidine, some of it will be transformed into uracil. How do we know this? NASA has recreated the process in the lab. So what? Most water-ice in comets contains various organic molecules, pyrimidine [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Also tagged asteroids, comets, DNA, origin of life, pyrimidine, RNA, uracil Leave a comment
Exploiting suborbital space