CSA Astronaut Chris Hadfield performed a simple science experiment designed by grade 10 Lockview High School students Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner. The students from Fall River, Nova Scotia won a national science contest held by the Canadian Space Agency with their experiment on surface tension in space using a wet washcloth.
Two “Star Trek” fans are a couple of weeks away from fully restoring the last surviving large set piece from the venerable 1960s TV show.
Adam Schneider and Alec Peters are refurbishing the 24-foot (7.3 meter) long Shuttlecraft Galileo used to shuttle the crew of the Starship Enterprise back and forth from the ship.
SPACE.com spoke with Schneider and Peters about the restoration, the American space program and what “Star Trek” means to them.
It’s been an interesting few months for the commercialization of space.
The festivities kicked off last March, when the 3D modeling platform Sunglass and space company DIYRockets announced an incentive competition aimed at creating an “open-source 3D-printed rocket engine” capable of sending nano-satellites into orbit.
The challenge marks the first time an open source methodology has been applied to the commercial space industry. The hope is that these next wave rockets will democratize the growing low-Earth orbit small-payload delivery market and, ultimately, disrupt the entire space transportation space.
The idea that this will happen sooner rather than later is not even a stretch. Remember it took Chris Anderson and his cohorts at DIY Drones about a year’s worth of open source work to create an autonomous quadcopter that duplicated 90 percent of the military’s $250,000 Raven, except that they cost about $300 dollars.
Meanwhile, the 3D rocket contest announcement was followed a few weeks later by the next bit of space news: the April 19 launch of SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket…
Smartphones can check e-mail, record videos and even stream NPR. Now NASA has discovered they make pretty decent satellites, too. Three smart phones launched into space this past Sunday are orbiting above us even now, transmitting data and images back to Earth. The PhoneSats, which cost just a few thousand dollars each, could usher in big changes for the satellite industry.
The PhoneSats started as a project among young engineers working at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. Jim Cockrell, the project’s manager, says it began as a hallway conversation. One noted that smartphone microprocessors are cheaper than those in satellites. So why not just use a smartphone as a satellite?
This is the raw data from the Planck mission of the intensity fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. At the highest resolution it includes 50 million pixels of information.
For a selection of scientific papers on the subject see this paperscape graph. For some commentary on Planck’s results, try the blog entries here,here or here. See the Planck Chromoscope for flat 2D maps.
You can use your mouse to control the view: click-drag will change the latitude/longitude, double click zooms in, and mouse scroll-wheel zooms in and out.
The following key bindings are also available: left, right, up, down (scroll the view), +, – (zoom), r (reset view).
The raw data is tiled over a sphere using this scheme. WebGL and thethree.js library are used for rendering.
This exceptional image of the Horsehead nebula was taken at the National Science Foundation’s 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak with the NOAO Mosaic CCD camera. Located in the constellation of Orion, the Hunter, the Horsehead is part of a dense cloud of gas in front of an active star-forming nebula known as IC434. The nebulosity of the Horsehead is believed to be excited by the bright star Sigma Orionis, which is located above the top of the image. Just off the left side of the image is the bright star Zeta Orionis, which is the easternmost of the three stars that form Orion’s belt. Zeta Orionis is a foreground star, and is not related to the nebula.
Perhaps I am susceptible to link-baiting, but I kept the title in place above from this fun 3ders.org article: lunar base + giant NASA spider robot = I gotta read more! And I was not disappointed. NASA is starting to become everything I dreamed it might be when I played with LEGO space vehicles in my backyard as a child. AWESOME:
Last month, the European Space Agency (ESA) was teaming up with its industrial partner renowned architects Foster + Partners to test the feasibility of 3D printing using lunar soil and to build a lunar base.
It seems that NASA has also got a similar idea: using existing resources on the moon to build those structures. Space architects Tomas Rousek, Katarina Eriksson and Dr. Ondrej Doule have unveiled their vision for a lunar module which shows the potential of 3D printing technology from NASA.
Both bases would be located near the Shackleton crater, close to the Moon’s south pole, where sunlight (and thus solar energy) is nearly constant, and both use lunar dust as basic building material. But NASA’s idea is slightly different.
Due to the unique properties of the lunar soil and the absence of anatmosphere, NASA’s modules would be constructed from lunar soil by microwave sintering and contour crafting making use of NASA JPL robotics system. The tech is called SinterHab….
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Just when you thought space couldn’t get more cute. From Melody Green:
Cornerstone Christian school 7th grade science project.
The effects of Altitude on air pressure and temperature.
Cameras: GoPro Hero2 video footage.
Edited By: Eddie Lacayo
Flight gear: High Altitude Science
Flight computer / Data acquisition: High Altitude Science
Tree Climber: Woodpecker Arborist.
Colonel Chris Hadfield recently recorded the first original song written for and performed on the International Space Station. He joins a long and venerable tradition of astromusicians.
This is a recording of the background noise of the US lab on the International Space Station, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield. This is what normal life sounds like in space.
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