Coming soon to a red planet near you, it's the
Mars Science Laboratory! On
Monday, August 6 at 05:31 UTC (
other times around the world), NASA's
Curiosity rover is expected to land on Mars in search of conditions suited to
past or present Martian life. Live coverage begins on
NASA TV at 03:30 UTC.
But this mission has been years in the making, so if you have a little catching up to do...
[more inside]
posted by ddbeck
on Aug 4, 2012 -
139 comments
In the late 1970s the UK's Anglia Television ran a respected weekly documentary series:
Science Report. But when the show was cancelled in 1977, the producers decided to channel Orson Welles in their final episode. The result was
Alternative 3. Over the course of the hour, the audience would learn that a
Science Report investigation into the UK "brain drain" had uncovered shocking revelations: man-made pollution had resulted in catastrophic climate change, the Earth would soon be rendered uninhabitable, and a secret American / Soviet joint plan was in place to establish colonies on the Moon and Mars. The show ended with footage of a US/Soviet Mars landing from May 22, 1962. After Alternative 3 aired,
thousands of panicked viewers phoned the production company and demanded to know how long they had left to change planets. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 20, 2012 -
22 comments
The United States Department of Defense has
generously "decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope." They apparently had some antiquated spy satellite hardware sitting around unused and unwanted. NASA still needs to find money to outfit them with recording instruments and pay a team to manage them,
which may take 8 years
posted by crayz
on Jun 4, 2012 -
69 comments
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich has put together the fantastic short video
Measuring the Universe which briefly describes the different techniques used to allow us to calculate the vast distances to stellar objects in space.
[via]
posted by quin
on May 30, 2012 -
11 comments
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon cargo capsule is scheduled to launch at 8:55 am UTC on Saturday, May 19, 2012 - a little less than 12 hours from now.
[more inside]
posted by egor83
on May 18, 2012 -
52 comments
In a
recent episode of
Mad Men titled "
Lady Lazarus," Pete Campbell has an existential crisis when he sees a picture of the Earth from space, but were there color pictures of the whole Earth in October 1966? First some background...
[more inside]
posted by quartzcity
on May 10, 2012 -
87 comments
Chilling amateur home video of the Challenger disaster "Obviously a major malfunction." Those words have always haunted me, but to hear them here, echoing across a PA system as shocked onlookers come to terms with what they have just seen, they carry even more power than they did when they were just an anonymous voiceover on a TV shot.
posted by LondonYank
on May 2, 2012 -
107 comments
Carl Sagan wrote, “We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.” But how will humans or our machine representatives
fly to the stars? [more inside]
posted by audi alteram partem
on May 1, 2012 -
42 comments
"NASA is one of the few institutions I know that can inspire five-year-olds. It sure inspired me, and with this endeavor, maybe we can inspire a few more youth to invent and explore." An undersea expendition funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
has discovered the spent
rocket engines used to power
Apollo 11.
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Mar 29, 2012 -
59 comments
