Enjoy The Carnage Of Liftoff
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010Enjoy this stunning HD video of the Apollo 11 rocket taking off… in HD! No clue how they kept the camera from melting, but their innovation makes for a great video.
Archive for the ‘NASA’ Category
NASA Mulls Asteroid Probe in 2106
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
In an update to our story from last week (Asteroid Heading For Earth (in 2182)!), NASA is considering sending a probe to the ominous asteroid 1999 RQ36 to collect rock samples so they can more accurately when and if it will collide with earth. The project is being proposed as part of the New Frontiers program, and is competing with a trip to Venus for funding.
Basically, we are choosing between finding out when Earth will be destroyed or finding somewhere else to go before it is. Considering Bruce Willis will most likely not be around when the time comes I think we can safely write off the ‘Armageddon Option.’
Doctored Pictures, UFOs & Sore Jaws: Top 5 Moon Landing Hoax Videos
Monday, July 20th, 2009The Apollo 11 moon landing happened 40 years ago toady, or as 6% of the country believe according to a new survey, one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated hoodwinked the world at large.
Here are five videos that help document the intervening four decades dotted with controversy, analysis, British people and Buzz Aldrin’s devastating right cross.
Saturn’s Persistent Hexagon
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Saturn’s North Pole (Cassini-Huygens, 2007 and 2008)
In November 1980, planetary scientists eagerly examined transmissions received from the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it sped past Saturn. And with good reason! Amid those transmissions was the first image of Saturn’s North Pole – a region that’s virtually impossible to see from Earth, and, depending on the degree by which Saturn is tilted, can be cloaked in darkness for up to 15 years at a time (and you thought your last winter was never going to end).
What those scientists saw, and later missions confirmed, was a decidedly bizarre feature in the gas giant’s atmosphere directly above the North Pole: a 15,000-mile-wide hexagon.
Making Star Trek Possible: Warp speed without the warp drive
Friday, May 8th, 2009A five-part series that tries to explain how to make the science of Star Trek real…
Probably the most fascinating idea that Star Trek popularized was the idea of a warp drive. This was a concept from golden age sci-fi that went mainstream via Trek as space-age audiences became sophisticated enough to realize that NASA’s fastest rockets wouldn’t take you very far in a human lifetime. Even going the speed of light wouldn’t work for a show that tried to visit more than one star system in it’s 3 season run (due to time dilation your characters could visit those places, but their friends back on earth would be long dead). What was needed was a (plot) device that allowed you to visit distant planets in the time it takes to drive to the next state.
Since Star Trek, warp drive has become a part of public consciousness. It’s a theoretical form of technology that some feel is as inevitable as AI and teleportation.
There’s one big catch; while AI (or something that acts like it) seems to be a problem solved at some point on a graph projecting the development of intelligent systems and teleportation seems to be more of an energy problem, there’s not a viable theory for how a warp drive could work (exotic matter, worm holes, Alcubierre drives etc.) that doesn’t violate the laws of physics (as we know them) or result in some equation balancing phenomenon like a “quantum scream” (an obscure term used in an equally obscure paper on the subject).
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