The Sequester, NASA, and BRAIN
Sequestration is having a horrific effect on Americans from one coast to another (except, of course, for those that enacted it) and it’s only going to get worse as time goes by. We’re watching it unfold before our eyes – cuts in funding for schools, airport towers shutting down, federal employees and contractors being furloughed, [...]
Spring Equinox 2013 From Space
Yesterday, March 20 was the vernal equinox. That is, the moment in Earth’s orbit around the Sun where both hemispheres are equally lit. Not only did we get to experience an even 12 hours of daylight / 12 hours of night here on the surface, but it looked pretty cool in space as well: As [...]
Stardust: Voyager’s witness
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged (sorry about that, much has been going on in the last month but still), but I would be more than a little remiss if I didn’t share this amazing video: This is Stardust from PostPanic director Mischa Rozema. It depicts Voyager 1, currently on its way out of [...]
NASA Johnson Style!
I confess I haven’t blogged nearly as much as I expected to this month, and perhaps that’s because I’ve allowed the events in the news to consume more of my attention than I wish it had. Still, there is an amazing universe out there to explore. And there’s also this: There are several parodies of [...]
Reliving Apollo 11′s descent to the Moon
With the recent passing of Neil Armstrong, there have been many tributes to the first manned landing on the moon. Tamtech has done something I’ve never quite seen before – a real-time playback of the audio, video, and spacecraft telemetry of the actual Apollo XI landing. The movie points out who’s talking, both from the [...]
Build your own space communications network – on your iPhone
Among the many unsung heros of the space program are the people who build and maintain NASA’s space communications networks. After all, every spacecraft, whether it’s Hubble, the International Space Station, or even your everyday weather satellite has to communicate with the ground somehow. But let’s face it, space communication is not exactly the glitziest [...]
The Milky Way’s hot halo
It’s easy to think about our Milky Way galaxy all by itself out in space, surrounded by a halo of globular star clusters, some small satellite galaxies, and that nothing else except for its neighbors millions of light-years away. But the reality is likely quite different. Our home galaxy may be surrounded by an extended halo [...]
Crowdfunding a space science startup
It doesn’t appear that our investment in NASA is going to change anytime soon, and that’s a shame because about 10% of NASA’s budget goes to funding research and education. In other words only about 0.05% of the entire federal budget goes towards actually funding the research that leads to scientific and engineering breakthroughs or [...]
The coolest Curiosity descent video you will ever see
By now you’ve probably seen several of the videos of MSL Curiosity’s descent to the surface of Mars, but I betcha haven’t seen it like this: Is that incredible or what? This video is brought to us not by NASA, but by Bard Canning, an “amateur” video engineer who obviously put a lot of work [...]
One final leap…
Today, Neil Armstrong was laid to rest in a private burial at sea in Navy tradition. Of course, Armstrong’s passing will spark the recurring question of when or whether NASA will return astronauts to the Moon or beyond. But for today, I wanted to remember Armstrong in the seminal moment that defined his life, and [...]
