Posts Tagged ‘space’
Earth-Like Planet Found by NASA
This is so cool. NASA has found an Earth-like planet, described as “Earth’s bigger, older cousin.”
This isn’t a picture of real space travel.
Read the full story at CNN.com.
Related articles (Note: These are offsite links; DaddyTips takes no responsibility for outside content.)
Oh Snap, Pictures of Pluto
Guess what? Earth people (or at least devices built by Earth people, specifically people at NASA) have finally gotten close to Pluto. And they took pictures!
From BusinessInsider:
“People didn’t think it could be done … but it’s worked essentially flawlessly for the last nine years,” Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons, said about the spacecraft and its mission on Tuesday at a NASA briefing.
For decades, the Plutonian system was the only one of the original nine planetary systems in the solar system unexplored by the space agency.
Now, NASA has become the first organization to reach the dwarf planet and its moons, and it can finally tick off that empty check box marked “Pluto.”
Usually I hope for the discovery of alien beings on other worlds. In this case, though, I kinda hope there aren’t any Plutonians. If there are, I hope they don’t mind that we demoted their world to “dwarf planet” status awhile back.
This of course assumes that the Plutonians are capable of aggressive action, and if so, are interested in attacking us. Which is not a given. The planet could be populated by super-intelligent shades of the color blue, for example. (Apologies to Douglas Adams.)
No matter what, I say GO NASA GO! YAY SPACE TRAVEL! (Remember when we said it was time to get more excited about space travel? We meant it. Yay outer space!)
Source: Humankind visits Pluto for first time – Business Insider
Related articles (Note: These are offsite links; DaddyTips takes no responsibility for outside content.)
Cool Space Images of Saturn
In our ongoing effort to get more excited about space, here is a link to some cool space images of Saturn.
(This isn’t a picture of real space travel. It’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Old TV show.)
This quote from writer Jesus Diaz sums it up nicely:
I don’t know about you, but all these photos taken by a camera 746 million miles (1.2 billion kilometers) away from us blow me away.
Two-mile-high structures rising on Saturn’s rings. (via Sploid)
More Cool Space News
Ready for more cool space news? This Gizmodo headline had me at “hello world” — NASA Will Reformat Mars Rover’s Flash Memory From 125 Million Miles Away.
How neat is that? According to Gizmodo, “NASA’s Opportunity rover is still trundling across the surface of Mars… But its software is getting bogged down, so NASA’s doing a full system backup, memory wipe, and reboot. It’s just like your routine computer cleanup, just from the next planet over.”
The Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity (note to future Geek Gold Gard parents — good names for twins!) have 256MB of flash memory each.
Imagine it this way. It is the Dark Times, the days of Windows 95, 98, and (Lords of Cobol help us all) Windows ME. Eventually the computer running said operating systems becomes so filled with cruft that it is unusable. (To be fair, this happened to me recently with Windows 7, although that was more about the bloatware that came pre-installed on the laptop. But I digress.) You reformat the hard drive and re-install the OS. (In my case, after several years of this, you give up, buy a Mac, and become an iHole.)
Now imagine that you are doing something similar, but remotely. REALLY remotely. Like, you’re on Earth and the computer is on frickin’ MARS.
Remember, we promised to get more excited about space travel.
This XKCD comic was in the comments section on Gizmodo, but I’m reposting it here because (a) I can (XKCD is cool that way) and (b) it’s funny.
NASA Will Reformat Mars Rover’s Flash Memory From 125 Million Miles Away – Gizmodo
Image via Wikipedia
Related articles (Note: These are offsite links; DaddyTips takes no responsibility for outside content.)
Space News!
NASA detects mysterious signal ?240 million light years away from Earth (Sploid/Gawker)
SpaceX Launches Rocket Into Orbit | TIME.com
Remember when we said we were going to start getting more excited about space travel? This is us doing that.
SpaceX Launches Rocket Into Orbit | TIME.com.
Neil Armstrong Says The World Needs Nerdy Engineers
In our ongoing effort to get more excited about space travel and all things space science-y, here is a video from Universe Today in which Neil Armstrong says the world needs more nerdy engineers.
Universe Today (UT… actually, I don’t want to use that abbreviation, people might think I’m talking about the University of Texas, or the state of Utah) is a very cool web site that I was recently turned on to by Lucas Gonze. It is something that I should read daily. I’m saying this publicly in order to shame myself into following through on that plan.
Also, this pic from the Universe Today twitter feed is all sorts of awesome.
Awesome! RT @kpcuk: ;) .-? / |? ?| ? ? | . ?| |[][][]| |F9?| |?? | S | | P | | -? | C? | E | | X? | |?? |?? /_/_
— Universe Today (@universetoday) April 1, 2014
Neil Armstrong: Why The World Needs ‘Nerdy Engineers’ (In Animated Form).
Related articles (Note: These are offsite links; DaddyTips takes no responsibility for outside content)
