Tag Archives: Space
"Dead" Space (11 minutes of dying)
Posted on 24. Oct, 2008
"Dead" Space (11 minutes of dying) Source: uk.youtube.com Absolutely loving Dead Space! Scares the willies out of me, goose bump city, super scary.
"Dead" Space (11 minutes of dying)
For the Scrabble fans
Posted on 22. Oct, 2008
For the Scrabble fans Source: xkcd.com
For the Scrabble fans
Sex and the Olympic city - Times Online
Posted on 22. Aug, 2008
Sex and the Olympic city - Times Online Source: www.timesonline.co.u... I am often asked if the Olympic village - the vast restaurant and housing conglomeration that hosts the world's top athletes for the duration of the Games - is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is.
Sex and the Olympic city - Times Online
Everquest Design 2004 - Own a piece of history
Posted on 30. Nov, 2004
Laptop bags made out of stuff from space. [via Boing Boing]
http://everquestdesign.com/...
Slashdot | Cassini Shatters Titan Theories
Posted on 04. Jul, 2004
http://science.slashdot.org/...
Venus Transit
Posted on 13. Jun, 2004
Steve took some great pics of the Venus transit courtesy of some telescopes set up by the Macquarie Uni Observatory people.
http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/...
Gravity Probe B (GP-B)
Posted on 18. Dec, 2003
NASA have set 20 April 2004 as the new launch date for GP-B, a very interesting experiment to test Einstein's theories of geodetic effect and frame dragging:
Fascinating!
http://einstein.stanford.edu/...
Giant star caught swallowing three planets
Posted on 23. Sep, 2003
"The burst of light from V838 Monocerotis "echoed" outwards as it illuminated circumstellar dust. Sequence: May to December 2002 (Hubble image: NASA, ESA and H E Bond, STScI)" [via jwz]
http://www.newscientist.com/...
Columbia rescue options were limited
Posted on 04. Feb, 2003
Interesting write up over at Space.com on the potential rescue techniques that could have been employed to fix the shuttle and/or save the astronauts if significant life threatening damage was suspected early in the mission. Interesting that NASA could have potentially scrambled another shuttle launch in the space of a week if all safety protocols were ignored.
http://www.space.com/...
Columbia on mission STS-107 breaks up on re-entry
Posted on 02. Feb, 2003
All seven astronauts lost in a re-entry accident of Space Shuttle Columbia. The shuttle was just 16 minutes from landing at KSC Florida and was at about 203,000 feet traveling at Mach 18 when mission control lost contact. As a close follower of the NASA missions I had watched the launch day preparations, launch and first few days of the mission live on the web via NASA TV when they lifted off on the 16th January. Everything went smoothly and the crew were all very excited. I guess the only consolation they have is that at least they were able to spend their full two weeks in space and live their dream.
The common theory in the media at the moment is that a fragment of insulation from when the liquid fuel tank separated during ascent hit the left wing and damaged the heat shielding. NASA engineers had assessed the damage and viewed it as safe during the two weeks on orbit. It is suggested that the missing heat shielding on the leading edge of the left wing may have allowed the wing structure to heat too much and therefore break apart from the orbiter resulting in complete breakup.
It's true that most people see these shuttle missions as commonplace day-to-day thing now and pay little attention to them. For enthusiasts like me who watch nearly every mission live on NASA TV, I am completely amazed everytime that shuttle launches and returns sucessfully, and have much respect for the engineers and crew behind each launch. Such an incredibly complex piece of equipment supported by thousands of NASA employees, crewed by extraordinary individuals who've dedicated their lives to working in space. We really are a hopeless bunch of underacheivers in comparison to these extraordinary people.
Media coverage has certainly been moronic. With the typical big news reporters who have no understanding of how the shuttle works wheeled in to ask a range of stupid questions of NASA administrators. If one more reporter asks if it had a black box, I'm going to lose it. They seem so conditioned to the black box concept that they don't realise all telemetry is beamed to mission control in real-time, the black box is infact mission control at Houston. I'm waiting for the moronic buy line stating: "NASA has no idea what caused the disaster as shuttles do not carry a black box".
Steve MacLaughlin has an excellent round up of shuttle events on his blog. [via Boing Boing]
Fe
Close-up of NEAT passing the Sun
Posted on 01. Feb, 2003
Here's something you don't see every day, using the last 48 hours of archived solar imagery from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft (SOHO) you can actually see the NEAT comet pass by the sun on the 28th and 29th January. Note the animated GIF of the SOHO's imagery is 10MB in size, but is excellent quality and well worth it. Also I never knew there was a real-time sun cam on the web. Apparently the NEAT comet should be viewable with the naked eye, but I'm not sure of the viewing times for the Southern Hemisphere.
http://www.space.com/...
STS-113 touchdown
Posted on 19. Jan, 2003
The best flying job in the world.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/...
Rendelsham files released
Posted on 09. Dec, 2002
The UK Ministry of Defence declassified the Rendelsham UFO files last week after years of lobbying by ufoligists. I haven't read them, but here's the first file anyway, just so you can see what a top secret government UFO file actually looks like.
Eclipse 2002
Posted on 04. Dec, 2002
Stu has gone bush to watch the Solar Eclipse. I sort of forgot about it, and now I regret not making an effort to go bush as well. It's quite a rare and extraordinary opportunity to have the best full-darkness vantage point located in Australia. I'd probably regret it though as I really really hate camping.
http://www.assa.org.au/...
Shuttle External Tank Cam (Quicktime, 1.2MB)
Posted on 24. Oct, 2002
They showed glimpses of this impressive camera angle in the news a couple of weeks ago, there's a nice long version of it on the NASA HSF web site:
[via MeFi]
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/...
One dead as Russian Soyuz blows up
Posted on 17. Oct, 2002
An ultra-reliable Soyuz rocket exploded 29 seconds after take-off in Russia:
Russia - The Ride of Your Life
Posted on 17. Apr, 2002
Fascinating Foreign Correspondent last night on Russian Space Tourism. Among others, they interviewed South African founder of Thawte Consulting, Mark Shuttleworth, who is spending US$20mil on his flight to the International Space Station. If I had that kind of money, I wouldn't hesitate for a second, it would be the ultimate adventure. I still rate seeing a space shuttle blast off from Kennedy Space Centre in 1998 as one of the most awesome things I've ever seen, imagine being on it.
http://www.abc.net.au/...
10 million miles earns you a flight into space
Posted on 16. Mar, 2002
I can't find a link to the article, but US Airways is giving customers who have accumulated 10 million miles a ride on a sub-orbital space flight on one of the commercial space ventures that will be popping up over the next few years.
http://www.space.com/...
STS-109
Posted on 02. Mar, 2002
If you've got broadband, I highly recommend watching NASA TV over the next few days, it's quite amazing to see activities in the orbiter live. The mission is to make repairs and modifications to the Hubble space telescope, in a series of three spacewalks. It's a nice change from the last half-dozen missions to the International Space Station. If you time it right you might see live footage from the EVA space suit helmet mounted cameras as they work on Hubble. Listening to all the com traffic between mission control and the orbiter crew is fascinating as well. Very cool!
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/...
