What if you could compress a video clip into a single image? That’s what Jay Mark Johnson, an artist and visual effects director, has accomplished through the use of a special camera technique. He calls the images “photographic timelines,” and his collected works offer quite a shift to conventional perception.
The search for water ice on the moon could be led someday by a robot armed with a 4-foot drill. With the first prototype of the lunar rover, called Polaris, comes the prospect of eventually extracting resources from the moon, asteroids or other planets through space mining.
Space Exploration Technologies, also known as SpaceX, launched the first of 12 cargo missions to the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday, restoring U.S. access to the orbital outpost for the first time since the space shuttles were retired last year.
It’s one small hop for a rocket, but one giant leap for reusable rocket ships: A private rocket prototype has sailed through a 6-foot hop that, while short, marked a in a major test for a novel reusable launch system being developed by commercial spaceflight company SpaceX.
Richard Branson has spoken of the ‘explosion’ in space travel which he expects to come to fruition over the next few years, as private space travel ventures such as Virgin Galactic begin to gather pace.
“It’s going to be an explosion of people having had the chance to go into space and enjoy the marvels of space travel,” explained the Virgin Group founder to USA Today.
“In the past 30 years, only 500 people have been to space. I suspect in the next 30 years there may be something like five million people who will have had the opportunity to become astronauts.”
When the Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover landed on Aug. 6, it was another step forward in the effort to eventually send humans to the Red Planet. Using the lessons of the Apollo era and robotic missions to Mars, NASA scientists and engineers are studying the challenges and hazards involved in any extraterrestrial landing.
Scientists who have for years been closely following Voyager 1’s slow drift into the interstellar region of the Milky Way had a false alarm last month when the 35-year-old spacecraft measured a drop in solar particles that they were sure was a sign it had finally exited our solar system.
A NASA spacecraft orbiting the huge asteroid Vesta suffered a glitch last week, but mission controllers say it will not affect plans for its upcoming trip to Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system.
NASA has announced new agreements with three American commercial companies to design and develop the next generation of U.S. human spaceflight capabilities, enabling a launch of astronauts from U.S. soil in the next five years. Advances made by these companies under newly signed Space Act Agreements through the agency’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative are intended to ultimately lead to the availability of commercial human spaceflight services for government and commercial customers.
China tested a new rocket engine Sunday (July 29) for a more powerful, next-generation booster that will be used to help the country construct its first space station in orbit, and for future missions to explore the moon, according to news reports.
You know you’ve found something good when you can take a headline straight out of a research paper and slap it right onto a blog article. Multi-stage micro rockets and flying robotic insects! Can it get any more awesome?
While interstellar journeys have been explored by researchers, one type of mission has not received much attention, namely the interstellar rendezvous and return mission that could be accomplished on timescales comparable with a working scientist’s career.
While NASA waits with bated breath for the Curiosity rover’s arrival on the Martian surface, engineers at NASA and the Canadian Space Agency are already at work testing a new lunar rover designed to seek out water and other natural resources closer to home. The rover payload, known as the Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatiles Extraction (RESOLVE), is designed to spend nine days prospecting for water resources on the moon sometime in the future.
LauncherOne can travel at 25 times the speed of sound (Mach 25) at 18,000mph, and will place the satellites in orbit after being released from WhiteKnightTwo at an altitude of 50,000 feet above mean sea level. It is simply mind-boggling.
As my dad always said: “Isn’t life wonderful?” Standing here at Farnborough International Airshow with our spaceship next to us, really illustrates that point. She has to be the most beautiful plane in the world, even if we do say so ourselves.
