Cleared of Charges, Honor Student Goes to Space Camp @ ABC News.

Kiera Wilmot is going to space camp.

In late April, the 16-year-old central Florida honor student was accused of igniting a chemical explosion on school grounds, leading to her arrest and suspension from school, but authorities dropped criminal chargeslast week.

The nightmarish ordeal was shocking for her single mother, Marie Wilmot, who always encouraged Kiera and her twin sister, Kayla, to follow their passions.

“The initial phone call was terrifying,” Marie told ABC News. “Time will help I hope, it was devastating for me as a mother.”

While school officials debate whether Kiera will return to Bartow High School, the Wilmot family received an unexpected surprise.

The explosion struck a chord with 18-year NASA veteran Homer Hickam, a former lead astronaut training manager for Spacelab, and later for the International Space Station.

N9 Satellite Dish Control. Travis writes -

Here, my Nokia N9 in Europe is commanding my satellite dish in America. Clicking on a target physically moves the dish to aim in the appropriate direction, readjusting as the target moves in the sky.

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.

A revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Chris Hadfield, he’s just the best.

8 Questions for ‘Star Trek’ Superfans Restoring Galileo Shuttlecraft @ Space.com.

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 was one of the first books to feature photographs of the Moon’s surface, or so it seems! Astrophotography had its beginnings in the 1840s (with the first photograph of the Moon being a daguerreotype by John W. Draper that took over a half-an-hour to expose) but by the 1870s there was no photographic process in place to capture the details of the lunar surface that Nasmyth and Carpenter were observing. So this pair of enterprising gentlemen set forth and built a series of plaster models based on their observations, lit them with raking light and produced photographic illustrations for their book.

In the whole of their book there is only one photograph of the actual Moon, which was taken by Warren De la Rue (Plate III of the first edition, above).

This is not actually a photograph of the moon’s surface. It’s a photograph of a clay model based on Nasmyth and Carpenter’s observations and drawing through a telescope.

“Crowdsourcing The Final Frontier” from the Forbes Entrepreneurs Blog:

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…

Read more.

Chromoscope – View the Universe in different wavelengths.

The Milky Way is shown across the middle. The north pole of the Galaxy is towards the top. Use the mouse to drag the sky around.

Can You Hear Me Now? Cellphone Satellites Phone Home : NPR.

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?

The cosmic microwave background.

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.

Wired Space Photo of the Day @ Wired Science.

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….

Read more.

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!

Mechanical Buddhas by Wang Zi Won via Colossal

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.

Read more.

A Brief History of Musical Firsts in Space via Bruce.

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.

Ambient noise of the International Space Station…

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.

DIY Spaceship For a Five Year Old. Super cute -

Grasshopper 12-Story Test Flight – a rocket that takes off AND lands vertically!

SpaceX’s Grasshopper takes a 12-story leap towards full and rapid rocket reusability in a test flight conducted December 17, 2012 at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas.

National Science Foundation and NASA

Via The New York Times:

It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.

A planet, as depicted in this rendering, orbits the habitable zone of a star 20 light years from Earth, meaning it could have water on its surface.

Astrophyisical Journal
Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is orbiting a star about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

But if the finding is confirmed by other astronomers, the planet, which has three to four times the mass of Earth, would be the most Earthlike planet yet discovered, and the first to meet the criteria for being potentially habitable.

“It’s been a long haul,” said Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who, along with R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, led the team that made the discovery. “This is the first exoplanet that has the right conditions for water to exist on its surface.”

In a recent report for the National Academy of Science, astronomers declared the finding of such planets one of the major goals of this decade. NASA’s Kepler satellite — which was launched in March 2009 as a way to detect Earthlike bodies — is expected to harvest dozens or hundreds.

Gliese 581g (whose first name is pronounced GLEE-za) circles a dim red star known as Gliese 581, once every 37 days, at a distance of about 14 million miles. That is smack in the middle of the so-called Goldilocks zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.

“This is really the first Goldilocks planet,” Dr. Butler said.

Other astronomers hailed the news as another harbinger that the search for “living planets,” as Dimitar D. Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calls them, is on the right track.

“I’m getting goose bumps,” said Caleb Scharf of Columbia University.

But they expressed caution about this particular planet, noting uncertainties about its density, composition and atmosphere, and the need for another generation of giant telescopes and spacecraft in order to find out anything more about it. Other Goldilocks planets have come and gone in recent years.

The discovery was announced at a news conference Wednesday in Washington, and the findings have been posted on the National Science Foundation’s Web site and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Read more.

NASA – From Cassini for the Holidays: A Splendor Seldom Seen.

Just in time for the holidays, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn for more than eight years now, has delivered another glorious, backlit view of the planet Saturn and its rings.

On Oct. 17, 2012, during its 174th orbit around the gas giant, Cassini was deliberately positioned within Saturn’s shadow, a perfect location from which to look in the direction of the sun and take a backlit view of the rings and the dark side of the planet. Looking back towards the sun is a geometry referred to by planetary scientists as “high solar phase;” near the center of your target’s shadow is the highest phase possible. This is a very scientifically advantageous and coveted viewing position, as it can reveal details about both the rings and atmosphere that cannot be seen in lower solar phase.

The last time Cassini had such an unusual perspective on Saturn and its rings, at sufficient distance and with sufficient time to make a full system mosaic, occurred in September 2006, when it captured a mosaic, processed to look like natural color, entitled “In Saturn’s Shadow.” In that mosaic, planet Earth put in a special appearance, making “In Saturn’s Shadow” one of the most popular Cassini images to date.

Space…your science should be there, via Thingiverse:

If you’ve ever wanted to fly an experiment to the edge of space, this is your chance! PongSat by JP Aerospace is the World’s Space Program! A Pongsat is an experiment stuffed inside a ping pong ball, and we fly them for FREE! Sky’s (no– SPACE) is the limit! What will you fly?

Instructions

1. Read the getting started pdf: jpaerospace.com/pongsat/PongSGuide-n.PDF
2. Create your experiment per the guidelines in the pdf.
3. Cut open a ping pong ball and stuff your experiment inside (or 3D print one using the supplied model for extra geek appeal).
4. Fill out the form on the back page of the pdf from #1.
5. Mail us your PongSat with the form from #4, and we’ll fly your experiment on our next flight! Our balloon flights routinely reach an altitude of 90,000 to 100,000 feet!

Note: although the PongSat program is focused toward education, anyone anywhere may participate, student or not. The purpose of the program is learning by doing: an opportunity to get hands on with space easily.

Also, the model is provided for you to customize for your experiment, such as adding circuit board, switch, and sensor mounts. The only modification not allowed is making the diameter larger than 40mm, at least not without special permission.

Read More.

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!

Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars.

We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book.

Curiosity Snaps ‘Arm’s Length’ Self Portrait: Big Pic @ Discovery News.

In this intimate scene we can see Curiosity, as if in mid-playtime, in its Mars sandbox — a geologically interesting area called “Rocknest.” In the lower left are the scoop trenches where samples of Mars soil have been excavated and in the upper right, the base of Mt. Sharp (the unofficial name of Aeolis Mons, a 3-mile high mountain in the center of Gale Crater). Wheel tread-marks surround the rover.

Well, in this political season here in the US, finally there is a way to sort out the fittest candidate, with science.

Our customer Matthew sent us this great message about his experience:

This past weekend my friends, daughter and I launched our first successful near-space balloon project. This started out as a small project between my friends and I then ballooned to something I could share with my 9 year old daughter. In the end my daughter’s interest was piqued with the engineering and scientific process. She ended up helping me with the internal layout of our payload and the use of the Arduino GPS Logger Shield.

In the end we were able to launch, track, recover the payload and evaluate the data thank to the GPS Shield and an APRS tracker we built. The
thing that I am most proud of is sparking my daughter’s in engineering and electronics.

Thank you from a very proud parent, Matthew Denyszyn

This crew strongly deserved their High-altitude Balloon skill badges!

We’ve actually been covering CubeSats since 2008 — here’s an update from Stephen Murphey.

A CubeSat is a small satellite in the shape of a 10 centimeter cube and weighs just 1 kilogram. That’s about 4 inches and 2 pounds. The design has been simplified so almost anyone can build them and the instructions are available for free online. CubeSats can be combined to make larger satellites in case you need bigger payloads. Deployable solar panels and antennas make Cubesats even more versatile. The cost to build one? Typically less than $50,000.

Read more.