Nasa Archive

  • Is the Sun about to destroy every single piece of electronics you own?

    Is the Sun about to destroy every single piece of electronics you own?

    Posted on June 7, 2010 | No Comments
    We, and by "we" I mean all life on Planet Earth, owe our very existence to the Sun. It's nothing more than a typical star, really, but without it, this planet would be as barren as the day is long. (CG: Your home for old-timey phrases.) With that in mind, here's what could become a pretty important story as we move forward. NASA now believes that, for much of the modern era, the Sun has been, for lack of a better term, "asleep." What happens, then, to our electricity-based infrastructure when the Sun "wakes up"? The Solar Wind has already blown away the atmospheres of planets lacking a magnetosphere, so what else does the Sun have up its sleeve?

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  • Voyager 2 likely suffering from “flipped bit syndrome”

    Voyager 2 likely suffering from “flipped bit syndrome”

    Posted on May 19, 2010 | No Comments
    The Voyager 2 transmission hiccup appears to have been identified. The problem? "A value in a single memory location was changed from a 0 to a 1," said JPL’s Veronia McGregor. As I've said countless times to end users complaining about "computer problems": computers are all ones and zeroes inside, and who can tell what will happen when a one unexpectedly becomes a zero, or vice versa? Kudos to everyone at NASA for identifying the problem, and making plans to reset Voyager's memory so that its on-going mission may continue!

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  • Space Shuttle Atlantis fueled, awaiting her last mission

    Space Shuttle Atlantis fueled, awaiting her last mission

    Posted on May 14, 2010 | No Comments
    Isn’t she beautiful? The 25-year old Space Shuttle Atlantis is ready for her last mission. She has made the journey into space 31 times and this will hopefully be her last. After returning from delivering a mini research station to the Internation Space Station, she will be kept in a state of readiness in case [...]

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  • They don’t make ‘em like they used to: Voyager 2 repairs underway

    They don’t make ‘em like they used to: Voyager 2 repairs underway

    Posted on May 10, 2010 | No Comments
    Our Gadgets of Days Gone By series is over, and it focused pretty much on consumer goods that made our lives more entertaining or more bearable. But there's an awful lot of technology from decades past still in use today. Take for example the Voyager spacecraft from NASA. Launched more than 30 years ago, Voyager 2 completed its primary mission in 1989 but has continued to provide invaluable scientific data and shows little signs of obsolescence. With something as useful and irreplaceable as Voyager 2, a small glitch in communications is not cause to scrap the program, but instead a reason to scramble the brightest folks available to resolve the problem -- no easy feat when communications with the probe take more than half a day to reach their target!

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  • Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 20th birthday with ridiculous photo

    Hubble Space Telescope celebrates its 20th birthday with ridiculous photo

    Posted on April 24, 2010 | No Comments
    It was 20 years ago today that NASA (working in conjunction with the European Space Agency) launched the Hubble Space Telescope into the heavens—well, a low Earth orbit, at least. I recall some of the buzz back then along the lines of “What a giant waste of money!” Once they fixed that mirror, it was smooth sailing.

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  • Omega Centauri, everyone

    Omega Centauri, everyone

    Posted on March 31, 2010 | No Comments
    Look at it. Isn't it beautiful? NASA says there are more than 10 million stars in that cluster, most of which are older than than our Sun. Just makes you think doesn't it?

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  • Your view doesn’t compare to the new view from the International Space Station

    Your view doesn’t compare to the new view from the International Space Station

    Posted on February 18, 2010 | No Comments
    Where do you live? Columbus? Miami? Paris? Lisbon? Cool, good for you. And I bet you have a nice view of your city’s park or monument, too. That’s fine, but your view doesn’t even compare to this. It’s a photo from the shiny, new observation deck of the International Space Station. That’s the Sahara Desert [...]

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  • The ISS gets its own HD video tour

    The ISS gets its own HD video tour

    Posted on February 8, 2010 | No Comments
    Sit back, relax, and enjoy this extensive HD video tour of International Space Station. You better enjoy the ISS while you can. There’s a good chance it’s going to crash into Planet Earth within the next couple of years because of budget issues unless the ESA can save it.

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  • Is this the first plane on the Moon?

    Is this the first plane on the Moon?

    Posted on February 3, 2010 | No Comments
    This image is proof that opening up space travel to private industry will speed up colonization and tourism. Apparently there’s already flights on the moon. That or a plane just so happened to get in the frame of a 500mm telephoto lens. [via reddit]

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  • CrunchDeals: A slightly-used NASA Space Shuttle

    CrunchDeals: A slightly-used NASA Space Shuttle

    Posted on January 18, 2010 | No Comments
    If you just so happen to be in the market for a second hand space craft, NASA has a deal for you, pal. The Space Shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour are currently for sale with a price tag of $28.2 m each. Just think, you could park one of these bad boys in your trailer park and [...]

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  • The European Space Agency wants to extend the ISS’s life until 2020

    The European Space Agency wants to extend the ISS’s life until 2020

    Posted on January 14, 2010 | No Comments
    Believe it or not, the current plan for the International Space Station is to abandon it in 2015 and let it crash into the atmosphere in 2016. Sad, right? But the ESA wants to keep it flying for a few more years to allow more scientist access to the zero-gravity labs.

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  • Forget the whack-jobs, the NASA photos don’t show trees

    Forget the whack-jobs, the NASA photos don’t show trees

    Posted on January 13, 2010 | No Comments
    Look at the photo above. Doesn't it look like rolling hills adorned with patches of trees? Well, it's not. That's a picture of Mars taken by the HiRISE, the most powerful camera sent to another planet, and the tree looking things are really just illusions. NASA says that they are just trails of debris left over from ice melt landslides and we can probably believe the agency.

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  • Mother Russia plans to save us all from killer asteroid

    Mother Russia plans to save us all from killer asteroid

    Posted on December 30, 2009 | No Comments
    Someone call Bruce Willis. Russia announced Wednesday that they are considering launching a spacecraft with the intention of altering its possibly earth-crushing trajectory to a less threatening one.

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  • NASA testing helicopter airbags – sounds like fun!

    NASA testing helicopter airbags – sounds like fun!

    Posted on December 9, 2009 | No Comments
    So, big problem with flying in a helicopter: if you crash, you're screwed. It's not like a jet, where you can eject (for obvious reasons), and it's not like helicopters are designed with a crumple zone. For this reason, NASA has been testing a possible solution that utilizes an airbag-type system.

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  • NASA: We found water on the Moon

    NASA: We found water on the Moon

    Posted on November 13, 2009 | No Comments
    Well, well. It looks like the Moon bombing went well as NASA just released a whole lot of data supporting the initial findings that there’s water on the Moon. Read NASA’s take and view a whole lot of line graphs I don’t understand at NASA.gov. Next up, moonQuest DSV.

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