Nasa Archive

  • Bigelow Aerospace building first private space station

    Bigelow Aerospace building first private space station

    Posted on June 8, 2010 | No Comments
    The federal government can't be bothered with space exploration anymore (which is terribly disappointing, by the way), so private industry has to pick up the slack. A company by the name of Bigelow Aerospace plans to put an entire space station in orbit within the next four years.

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  • 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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  • Video: What just smashed into Jupiter?

    Video: What just smashed into Jupiter?

    Posted on June 4, 2010 | No Comments
    Awesome video is awesome? Yes, yes it is. Something smashed into Jupiter a few hours ago, and an amateur astronomer caught the event on video. A similar event happened almost a year ago to the day. Now, does this mean that THE MAYANS WERE RIGHT or some other nonsense? No, of course not. What it does [...]

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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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  • U.S. military launches unmanned X-37B spacecraft. Too bad it refuses to tell us what it’s for!

    U.S. military launches unmanned X-37B spacecraft. Too bad it refuses to tell us what it’s for!

    Posted on April 23, 2010 | No Comments
    It's all a bit like Mass Effect. The U.S. Air Force successfully launched the X-37B unmanned spacecraft yesterday, but the question that nobody knows the answer to: what's it for? The Air Force refuses to say what the X-37B's mission on beyond something along the lines "we wanted to see if it works." OK, but do you plan on doing with it? "Sorry, classified." Neat.

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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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  • Virgin’s commerical spacecraft has itself a merry little test flight

    Virgin’s commerical spacecraft has itself a merry little test flight

    Posted on March 23, 2010 | No Comments
    The world’s first manned commercial spacecraft flight took place just a few hours ago, and it was a smashing success. Within a few years, we’ll all fly to Jupiter on our lunch breaks, drink a café com leite while doodling away on our iPad 5GXs, then come back to the office to pretend to do [...]

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  • Next Mars rover to have frikkin’ lasers

    Next Mars rover to have frikkin’ lasers

    Posted on February 17, 2010 | No Comments
    Apparently NASA saw something when they sent up the last Mars rover, because the next one is going to be packing heat. The next rover, named Curiosity, is scheduled to launch next year and will be equipped with an analysis system that uses high-energy laser pulses to help find out what Mars is made of.

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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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  • Daily Crunch: Coffee on Mars Edition

    Daily Crunch: Coffee on Mars Edition

    Posted on January 14, 2010 | No Comments
    Here's a selection of yesterday's stories: DIY: Build your own vacuum tube Tesla coil Someone obviously wants the crowd-developed Cable Caps, but I don’t Forget the whack-jobs, the NASA photos don’t show trees

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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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  • Comforting: Some unknown object to buzz Earth tomorrow morning

    Comforting: Some unknown object to buzz Earth tomorrow morning

    Posted on January 12, 2010 | No Comments
    Telescopes at the ready! Tomorrow morning at 7:47 AM Eastern, an unknown object between 33 and 50 feet wide will come within 80,000 miles of Earth. NASA’s finest are saying that it might be space junk, it might be a little asteroid, or it might be something else.

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