Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged #pewpew, Curiosity rover, inspiration, Mars, MarsCuriosity, NASA, persistence, R2D2, science, Science News, space, yay on May 5, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Oh, I love this*: the folks at the most excellent Science News have assembled a scrapbook of sorts for the Curiosity rover. It tracks the rover’s path from August 2012 to the present, and includes a date/sol-based timeline, rover tweets, photos, maps and commentary. Fun and educational. And fun!
* Partly for the same reason we love R2D2, no doubt; Curiosity is both awesome and adorable. Also, adventures in space!
Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged awesome, inspiration, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Johannes Kepler, JPL, Kepler Space Telescope, Kepler-16b, NASA, PlanetQuest, quotes, science, vacation, WPA on January 16, 2015| Leave a Comment »
Considering a weekend getaway? Check out travel posters for these new destinations, courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Kepler Space Telescope.
NASA made travel posters for real exoplanets, and they’re superb
I love the WPA-style presentation and terrific design sense. Want high-resolution versions to call your own? Check out the linked images in the engadget article or go to the NASA PlanetQuest Exoplanet Travel Series and click away.
Kepler-16b, here I come! (Now, where did I put my spacesuit?)
… the ways by which men arrive at knowledge of the celestial things are hardly less wonderful than the nature of these things themselves.
— Johannes Kepler
Posted in Entertainment, Likes, Science!, tagged awesome, carl sagan, entertainment, inspiration, NASA, nature, science, space on December 2, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Erik Wernquist’s lovely short film “Wanderers” is making the rounds online, and deservedly so. The piece uses dramatic visualizations of our solar system and is narrated with audio excerpts from Carl Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot. If you have four minutes and a yen for optimistic futurism, let this film help you imagine humanity’s future on the open road, “out there.” And it’s always good to hear Carl Sagan.
Posted in Holidays, Likes, tagged awesome, Halloween, jack-o-lantern, NASA, science, space on October 31, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Jack-o-lantern Sun. Credit: NASA/SDO
Posted in Science!, tagged aliens, astrobiology, extraterrestrial life, extremophiles, Mark Thiessen, Michael D. Lemonick, NASA, National Geographic, science, SETI, snottites, the Drake equation on July 10, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Today I bring you a great article in National Geographic, The Hunt for Life Beyond Earth. Written by Michael D. Lemonick with gorgeous photography by Mark Thiessen, the piece asks that age-old question: Are we alone?
We may find the answer to that question sooner than we think.
/insert dramatic music here!
Posted in Funny, Likes, Science!, tagged books, coding, computer literacy, cyberscammers, ergonomics, gender parity, genre fiction, Mother Jones, NASA, Octavia Butler, rally driving, science fiction, science!, sff, space, speculative fiction, STEM, sun dragons, SyFy on June 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Or, what I read with my morning tea. Entertainment, edification, and associated weirdness? Yep, these articles have it all. Enjoy!
Posted in Science!, tagged aeon magazine, Andy Weir, autonomy, boredom, creativity, Hawai'i, HI-SEAS, Kate Greene, Mars, Mars training, NASA, nonfiction, persistence, science, science fiction, space, space exploration, The Martian, training missions, trip to Mars on June 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Planet boredom
On Mars I learned that boredom has two sides – it can either rot the mind or rocket it to new places…
This essay provides a fascinating look at the HI-SEAS (Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) Mars training mission from the inside. Written by Kate Greene, a science and technology journalist (i.e. not an astronaut), the piece gives a great inside look at what a trip to Mars might be like. For speculative fiction writers, this sort of research provides terrific insight into what life in space would actually feel like to those living it.
Short answer? Boring. Longer answer? Sometimes boring can be a good thing…
Find the full essay at aeon Magazine. For more on the pitfalls of life on Mars, you could also check out Andy Weir’s recent novel The Martian.
Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged anthropology, archaeology, awesome, e book, extraterrestrial intelligence, extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrials, inspiration, money well spent, NASA, science, science fiction, SETI, sff, space on May 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »
In today’s installment of awesome, NASA has released a book on how to communicate with extraterrestrials. Unlike the Pentagon’s zombie apocalypse scenario, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication is not meant as an implausible training exercise. With chapters by more than a dozen scholars, this book uses analogues (or at least clues) from archaeology and anthropology in an effort to think about how to communicate with radically different life forms.
As editor Douglas A. Vakoch explains,
The evolutionary path followed by extraterrestrial intelligence will no doubt diverge in significant ways from the one traveled by humans over the course of our history… Like archaeologists who reconstruct temporally distant civilizations from fragmentary evidence, SETI researchers will be expected to reconstruct distant civilizations separated from us by vast expanses of space as well as time. And like anthropologists, who attempt to understand other cultures despite differences in language and social customs, as we attempt to decode and interpret extraterrestrial messages, we will be required to comprehend the mindset of a species that is radically Other.
Also, and let me just put this out there, science fiction might be helpful in this regard as well:)
P.S. The NASA in Your Life site is a fun read as well. NASA’s research and technology spinoffs have played influential roles in moving innovation from Rockets to Racecars and more…
Posted in Likes, Science!, tagged 92 minutes, awesome, Chris Hadfield, Earth, home, inspiration, ISS, NASA, orbital sunrise, orbital sunset, space, space exploration, yay on May 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »
ISS HD Live Streaming Earth
Sometimes the cameras are off, but when they aren’t… wow.
Black Image = International Space Station (ISS) is on the night side of the Earth.
Gray Image = Switching between cameras, or communications with the ISS is not available.
No Audio = Normal. There is no audio on purpose. Add your own soundtrack.
For a display of the real time ISS location plus the HDEV imagery, visit here: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ForFun/HDEV/
On watching orbital sunrise, from NPR:
Circling Earth at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour) every 92 minutes, the crew members aboard the International Space Station “experience 15 or 16 sunrises and sunsets every day,” NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) Project Office describes.
“The whole station glows with the light of dawn,” Canadian astronaut and former ISS commander Chris Hadfield told NPR in a recent interview. “You can see the dawn come across the world towards you.”
“Then you go back to work and wait another 92 minutes, and it happens again. It’s not to be missed, and I tried to watch as many sunrises and sunsets as the work would allow,” he said.
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