Nasa Archive

  • NASA turns iPhone into chemical sensor, can an App Store rejection be far away?

    NASA turns iPhone into chemical sensor, can an App Store rejection be far away?

    Posted on November 13, 2009 | No Comments

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    NASA turnes iPhone into chemical sensor, can an App Store rejection be far away?
    People have been trying to turn cellphones into medical and atmospheric scanners for some time now, but when it's NASA stepping up to the plate with a little device to monitor trace amounts of chemicals in the air, it's hard to not start thinking we might finally have a use for all those tricorder ringtones. Developed by a team of researchers at the Ames Research Center led by Jing Li, the device is a small chip that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone and uses 16 nanosensors to detect the concentration of gasses like ammonia, chlorine, and methane. To what purpose exactly this device will serve and why the relatively closed iPhone was chosen as a development platform are mysteries we're simply not capable of answering. Damn it, man, we're bloggers not scientists!

    [Via Gizmodo]

    NASA turns iPhone into chemical sensor, can an App Store rejection be far away? originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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  • National Geographic: 50 Years of Space Exploration

    National Geographic: 50 Years of Space Exploration

    Posted on October 13, 2009 | No Comments
    Ready to lose 20 minutes of your day? Check out this huge infograph that displays the last 50 years of space exploration. It’s awesome although it does kind of indicate that Venus is closer to earth than the Moon. The “50 Years of Space Exploration” graphic was created by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for [...]

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  • Good news: NASA did not blow up the Moon with the LCROSS

    Good news: NASA did not blow up the Moon with the LCROSS

    Posted on October 9, 2009 | No Comments
    Just a few minutes ago at 7:13:19 AM EDT, NASA crashed a probe into the Moon at 5,600 MPH with the hope of finding water. BOOM! NASA broadcasted the entire thing live on its TV station and online, but if you missed our previous post and just learned about the event, you probably didn't catch it. However, the NASA geeks are currently analyzing the LCROSS data and will hopefully announces their findings at the 10 AM EDT scheduled press event. In the mean time, go tell your wackjob neighbor that the Moon is still in the same ol' spot and there isn't a conspiracy to mess with the tides. Crazies. Gotta love 'em.

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  • Get ready for the LCROSS lunar impact this Friday

    Get ready for the LCROSS lunar impact this Friday

    Posted on October 6, 2009 | No Comments
    Be sure to set your alarm clock for around 6am this Friday, for at 6:15am NASA will, in the immortal words of Matt Drudge, “bomb the moon.” No, we're not talking about some dumb Hollywood (redundancy alert!) scenario, but the most exciting part of the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) program: the lunar impact.

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  • Just think of everything you could do with this NASA Omni-Hand prototype

    Just think of everything you could do with this NASA Omni-Hand prototype

    Posted on September 30, 2009 | No Comments
    For only $22,500 you can own the robotic hand shown in the video above. That’s nothing for a piece of NASA history. This impressive early prototype demands an important place within robotics history as the first motorized dexterous robotic hand. It represents one of the early steps towards making robots more anthropomorphic. The Omni-Hand was designed [...]

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  • NASA announces a contest to choose the next contest

    NASA announces a contest to choose the next contest

    Posted on September 29, 2009 | No Comments
    Apparently you don't have to be a rocket scientist to help NASA. The space agency just posted a request for suggestions for future prize contests on their website, and anyone may submit an idea.

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  • Water found on the Moon, BYOB for the pool party

    Water found on the Moon, BYOB for the pool party

    Posted on September 24, 2009 | No Comments
    That was quick. NASA just released some data last week recorded by the LRO that indicated water might be present and suddenly an Indian probe actually found some. India’s first Moon probe , Chandrayaan-1, is equipped with sensors to detect the electromagnetic signature of water. Furthermore, these sensors cannot penetrate very deep and the data [...]

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  • NASA lights up the East Coast

    NASA lights up the East Coast

    Posted on September 21, 2009 | No Comments
    East Coasters, did you see any weird clouds Saturday night? Some people did as the event caused reports and calls from Boston all the way down the coast to Florida. But you have nothing to fear, the aliens from Independence Day didn’t make them, NASA did. By using the exhaust particles from the fourth stage of a NASA [...]

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  • New thermal maps show the Moon gets damn cold

    New thermal maps show the Moon gets damn cold

    Posted on September 20, 2009 | No Comments
    The LRO has already provided us with a lot of fascinating high-res photos of the Moon's surface. But photos are just the start. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also has more instruments aboard and one of them, the Diviner Lunar Radiometer developed and operated by the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is sending back some wild info about the Moon's surface temperature.

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  • And for their next trick, NASA will levitate a mouse

    And for their next trick, NASA will levitate a mouse

    Posted on September 11, 2009 | No Comments
    mouseMicrogravity researchers at NASA have used a superconducting magnet that generated a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside a mouse, effectively simulating weightlessness for the rodents, right here on earth! The first floating mouse didn't seem very happy about the ordeal, so subsequent tests involved sedating the test mice. As should be expected, the doped up mice had a much better time floating around.

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  • Laptops… in space!

    Laptops… in space!

    Posted on September 6, 2009 | No Comments
    It's laptops in space, people! What is there not to like?

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  • Tonight’s spacewalk is still on even though space junk is headed right for them

    Tonight’s spacewalk is still on even though space junk is headed right for them

    Posted on September 3, 2009 | No Comments
    I don’t care what you say. Astronauts have balls of steel. They strap themselves onto a rocket, shit in a vacuum, and are risking death by space junk tonight. Apparently a new external ammonia tank for the ISS is important enough to risk getting it by a part of an old European rocket. NASA says that [...]

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  • The LRO can transmit 461GB everyday. That would cost $231,883 on AT&T.

    The LRO can transmit 461GB everyday. That would cost $231,883 on AT&T.

    Posted on August 20, 2009 | No Comments
    NASA already has major budget issues so it's a damn good thing the agency didn't turn to AT&T to provide the wireless data coverage for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Because AT&T charges $0.0195 per kilobyte over a 5GB cap, it would cost roughly $231,883 for the daily data transmission of the 461GB. That's $83,709,763 per year assuming AT&T didn't come up with some charge for interplanetary roaming. All joking aside, this Moon satellite has an impressive data transmitter.

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  • NASA needs $50 billion to reach the Moon by 2020

    NASA needs $50 billion to reach the Moon by 2020

    Posted on August 20, 2009 | No Comments
    Hopefully John Hodgman was correct in calling Obama the first nerd president. If not, humans might not reach the Moon anytime soon because we all know a jock wouldn't fund a science project. The current target is 2020 and the development is already underway of the vehicles needed to get people there. But there is one small issue: Money. NASA needs lots of money.

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  • Goodyear and NASA develop the next-gen lunar rover tire (it’s springy)

    Goodyear and NASA develop the next-gen lunar rover tire (it’s springy)

    Posted on August 6, 2009 | No Comments
    Eventually man will go back to the Moon and will need a way to travel in style. Goodyear and NASA has just unveiled the tire that will help with that. The Apollo astronauts used basic lunar rovers to explore a small part of the Moon's surface, but the current NASA plan is to sightsee a whole lot more. Because of the added distance, the original wire-type tire used in the 70's will not work. The new tire developed by Goodyear is designed to hold much more weight and withstand the abuse of a multi-thousand kilometer journey. Click through to see the tire in action.

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