Russians recovered a furry crew that spent a month in microgravity this week, only to confirm most arrived back on earth dead. Sad, but not as bad as it sounds: Arstechnica — A Russian spacecraft containing 45 mice, 8 gerbils, and 15 newts returned to Earth on Sunday. The spacecraft, a modified Bion-M life sciences satellite, …
Category Archive: NASA
May 16 2013
NASA picks Near Earth Object for return sample mission
NASA has announced the prime candidate for an ambitious unmanned mission that will visit a Near Earth Asteroid and return a sample of it to earth. The winner is 101955 Bennu, a member of the Apollo group of asteroids roughly half a klick in diameter:
May 12 2013
Would someone please think of the whiskey?
Space has a lot of resources, technically it has all the resources. Some of them are obvious, some serendipitous. Aside from the mountains of platinum group metals or nickel-iron and oxygen floating around free for the taking, in addition to the nearly inexhaustible energy sources, micro-gravity is a new and to date poorly utilized …
May 08 2013
Neat image from space
It’s a volcano. Click image for more info. Oh, and if you think neat things aren’t happening in space, especially on the ISS, how abut some space whiskey neat?
Apr 20 2013
Kepler finds exo-solar system full of ancient earth-sized worlds
Kepler, the probe that keeps on ticking, has found a well populated exo solar system of a type that could one day be the subject of a focused search by SETI – because there’s another interesting feature here: this star is very similar to our sun, it’s just a little smaller. Oh, and much, much older:
Apr 10 2013
It’s a fusion rocket engine!
Maybe Mars Inspiration should hold off on their proposed flyby launching in 2018. A new grant by NASA will reportedly develop a revolutionary engine that could reduce time travel to the Red Planet and other celestial destinations to a few weeks within a decade:
Mar 22 2013
And Neo was its name-o!
Not no that Neo, Near Earth Objects., i.e., dino killers, city busters, Siberian dynamite. The House and Senate finally had a hearing on the danger posed by NEOs. THey weren’t half bad, a round of bipartisan agreement almost broke out, and there were some quality comments mixed in with the noise and a plan in the …
Mar 11 2013
House Science Committee to hold hearings on impact danger
Forgive my absence gentle readers, I was on a well deserved R & R after the preceding, and life changing, two months (I had some evergreen content timed to go, I thought. But, well, for whatever reason Microsoft won again …). After which I was deemed healthy enough to return to work full time. So, last …
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