2014年8月31日 星期日

Space Shuttle and Space Station Photographed Together



How was this picture taken? Usually, pictures of the shuttle, taken from space, are snapped from the space station. Commonly, pictures of the space station are snapped from the shuttle. How, then, can there be a picture of both the shuttle and the station together, taken from space? The answer is that during the Space Shuttle Endeavour's last trip to the International Space Station in 2011 May, a supply ship departed the station with astronauts that captured a series of rare views. The supply ship was the Russian Soyuz TMA-20 which landed in Kazakhstan later that day. The above spectacular image well captures the relative sizes of the station and docked shuttle. Far below, clouds of Earth are seen above a blue sea. via NASA http://ift.tt/1qVSILQ

NASA New Horizons Has Decided To Change Astronomical Definitions

@carolynporco @OnlineJavi @ParddyMa Location is for realtors, not scientists. Titan is a planet. It orbits another planet. So what?— NewHorizons2015 (@NewHorizons2015) August 31, 2014 @NewHorizons2015 using a #NASA mission account to invent your own astronomical definitions and confuse people...



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Confusing Orion PR From NASA

NASA Outreach on Social Media, This is True "Worse, the word "Mars" isn't anywhere in the story. Isn't that the more interesting thing? We're going to Mars? Cool! What are we going to do there? Yet the story doesn't mention...



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Hayabusa 2 complete, ready to begin its journey to asteroid 1999 JU3

The excitement is building for Hayabusa 2! The spacecraft is now complete and ready to be shipped to its launch site. JAXA unveiled its next interplanetary traveler to the media in a special event on August 31.



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2014年8月30日 星期六

The Starry Sky under Hollow Hill



Look up in New Zealand's Hollow Hill Cave and you might think you see a familiar starry sky. And that's exactly what Arachnocampa luminosa are counting on. Captured in this long exposure, the New Zealand glowworms scattered across the cave ceiling give it the inviting and open appearance of a clear, dark night sky filled with stars. Unsuspecting insects fooled into flying too far upwards get trapped in sticky snares the glowworms create and hang down to catch food. Of course professional astronomers wouldn't be so easily fooled, although that does look a lot like the Coalsack Nebula and Southern Cross at the upper left ... via NASA http://ift.tt/1n77RoL

2014年8月29日 星期五

The Wizard Nebula



Open star cluster NGC 7380 is still embedded in its natal cloud of interstellar gas and dust popularly known as the Wizard Nebula. Seen with foreground and background stars along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy it lies some 8,000 light-years distant, toward the constellation Cepheus. A full moon would easily fit inside this telescopic view of the 4 million year young cluster and associated nebula, normally much too faint to be seen by eye. Made with telescope and camera firmly planted on Earth, the image reveals multi light-year sized shapes and structures within the Wizard in a color palette made popular in Hubble Space Telescope images. Recorded with narrowband filters, the visible wavelength light from the nebula's hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur atoms is transformed into green, blue, and red colors in the final digital composite. But there is still a trick up the Wizard's sleeve. Sliding your cursor over the image (or following this link) will make the stars disappear, leaving only the cosmic gas and dust of the Wizard Nebula. via NASA http://ift.tt/1u2ZCy5

NASA Opens Media Accreditation for Orion Move in Preparation for First Flight

Media accreditation now is open to attend an event marking the move of NASA's Orion spacecraft at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft will be transferred from the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility during the second week of September.



August 29, 2014

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The Pivotal Discovery You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Karl Battams highlights the historic discovery, by an Air Force satellite, of a sungrazing comet.



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The Rise and Fall (and Rise and Fall) of Planetary Exploration Funding

NASA has explored the solar system since the 1960s, but it has rarely been the top priority for the space agency. Jason Callahan breaks down how planetary science has been funded over the years within NASA's larger budget.



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NASA Probes Studying Earth’s Radiation Belts to Celebrate Two Year Anniversary

NASA's twin Van Allen Probes will celebrate on Saturday two years of studying the sun’s influence on our planet and near-Earth space. The probes, shortly after launch in August 2012, discovered a third radiation belt around Earth when only two had previously been detected.



August 29, 2014

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The Birth of the Modern Universe

Amir Alexander reviews Alan Hirshfeld's newest book, "Starlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe."



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Sparks Fly as NASA Pushes the Limits of 3-D Printing Technology

NASA has successfully tested the most complex rocket engine parts ever designed by the agency and printed with additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing, on a test stand at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.



August 28, 2014

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Hubble Looks at Light and Dark in the Universe



This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a variety of intriguing cosmic phenomena. Surrounded by bright stars, towards the upper middle of the frame we see a small young stellar object (YSO) known as SSTC2D J033038.2+303212. Located in the constellation of Perseus, this star is in the early stages of its life and is still forming into a fully-grown star. In this view from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys(ACS) it appears to have a murky chimney of material emanating outwards and downwards, framed by bright bursts of gas flowing from the star itself. This fledgling star is actually surrounded by a bright disk of material swirling around it as it forms — a disc that we see edge-on from our perspective. However, this small bright speck is dwarfed by its cosmic neighbor towards the bottom of the frame, a clump of bright, wispy gas swirling around as it appears to spew dark material out into space. The bright cloud is a reflection nebula known as [B77] 63, a cloud of interstellar gas that is reflecting light from the stars embedded within it. There are actually a number of bright stars within [B77] 63, most notably the emission-line star LkHA 326, and it nearby neighbor LZK 18. These stars are lighting up the surrounding gas and sculpting it into the wispy shape seen in this image. However, the most dramatic part of the image seems to be a dark stream of smoke piling outwards from [B77] 63 and its stars — a dark nebula called Dobashi 4173. Dark nebulae are incredibly dense clouds of pitch-dark material that obscure the patches of sky behind them, seemingly creating great rips and eerily empty chunks of sky. The stars speckled on top of this extreme blackness actually lie between us and Dobashi 4173. European Space Agency Credit: ESA/NASA via NASA http://ift.tt/1qLsmMk

Mississippi and Louisiana Students Get Out-of-This-World Start to the School Year

Students from Mississippi and Louisiana will gather at the INFINITY Science Center in Pearlington, Mississippi, for a long-distance call with NASA astronauts currently orbiting Earth aboard the International Space Station.



August 29, 2014

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The Closest Known Exoplanet? Maybe…

In 1992, the first planets outside the solar system were discovered, orbiting the dead cinder of a supernova. Three years later, 51 Peg was found, the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star. Now, after a decade of searching, we have a roster of nearly 2000 such planets, alien worlds circling alien stars.


They come in many varieties, with some being huge, Jupiter-like behemoths, and others far closer in size to our own hospitable planet. We’ve found them around distant stars hundreds of light years away, and some much closer.


And that brings us to a newly-found planet just announced: Gliese 15Ab. It has a mass of about five times Earth’s, which is interesting in and of itself; that makes it a super-Earth, if you will, a planet bigger than us but perhaps not quite massive enough to gravitationally attract a thick atmosphere. We don’t know much about what it’s like, but it’s probably not a gas giant.


But that’s not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that its host star, Gl 15A, is a mere 11.7 light years from Earth. It’s one of the 20 closest stellar systems known, making GL 15Ab quite possibly the closest known exoplanet!


Gliese 15 is a binary star, two cool, dim red dwarfs orbiting each other. Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the galaxy, but they’re so intrinsically faint that not a single one is visible to the naked eye; you need a telescope to see them. The closest star to the Sun we know of, Proxima Centauri, is only 4.2 light years away and even then too faint to see without using at least good binoculars.


Gliese 15 A and B (as the two stars are called, or just Gl 15A and B for short) orbit each other at a distance of about 22 billion kilometers, which is five times the distance Neptune orbits the Sun, so they’re pretty far apart. The planet discovered has a very tight orbit around the brighter of the two stars, Gl 15A, circling it a mere 11 million kilometers out. That’s close. Even though the star itself is a dim bulb, the planet is so near to it that it’s heated to at least the boiling point of water, and possibly hotter.


Gl 15Ab was found using what’s called the Doppler shift (or reflex velocity) method. Because the planet has significant mass, as it orbits its parent star in a big circle, the star itself makes a smaller circle every orbit, too. They actually each orbit their mutual center of mass, called the barycenter, like two kids facing each other, holding hands, and swinging each other around. If this sounds familiar, I just wrote about this recently because Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, do the same thing, and this was seen by the approaching New Horizons space probe.


We don’t actually see the star and planet move, but as the star approaches us in its orbit its light gets slightly blue-shifted, and as it moves away the light red shifts. The change is incredibly small, but the team of astronomers used the huge Keck 10-meter telescope with an extremely high-resolution detector. Their observing campaign has gone on for 11 years, enough to detect the planet pretty well. To be clear, they didn’t see the planet directly; they only saw its effect on the star. But this method has proven out many times, and is quite reliable.


The amount the planet can tug on its star depends on its mass, which is how they found the planet to have 5.35 ±0.75 times the mass of Earth, and by measuring the period of the oscillation determined its year to be just 11.44 Earth days long. That’s how they know it orbits the star so closely; that’s a short year!


We’re still new at all this, the finding of alien worlds. But we’re pretty good at it. We know of enough to start looking at them statistically, as a group, able to make some solid extrapolations. Given what we’ve seen so far, we think there are billions of planets in our galaxy alone. Billions! It’s like a Star Trek fever dream come true.


Given those odds, it’s not terribly surprising to find a planet so close to home. I’ll note that this planet isn’t technically confirmed; that is, also found by another team of astronomers or also seen using other methods (like undergoing transits). Still, this observation looks pretty solid, and if so this makes it one of if not the closest known exoplanets. A handful of other planet candidates have been found that are closer, but none is confirmed. There are fewer than 30 known stars and brown dwarfs (substellar objects that are similar to stars but smaller) closer than Gliese 15; many are in multiple systems, binaries or trinaries, so it’s entirely possible we’ll find and confirm a closer planet still.


But even with all that, this goes to show that the sky is likely filled with planets, and many of them are pretty close to us in a cosmic sense. It also shows just how hard it is to find them! 11 years of searching with one of the largest telescopes on Earth, and it was still a difficult task. But we’re getting better at this. If there are more, closer planets out there, we’ll find ‘em.


Tip o’ the warp nacelle to Dan Vergano.






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2014年8月28日 星期四

Messier 20 and 21



The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (top right). Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself is about 40 light-years across and a mere 300,000 years old. That makes it one of the youngest star forming regions in our sky, with newborn and embryonic stars embedded in its natal dust and gas clouds. Estimates of the distance to open star cluster M21 are similar to M20's, but though they share this gorgeous telescopic skyscape there is no apparent connection between the two. In fact, M21's stars are much older, about 8 million years old. via NASA http://ift.tt/1zJaz9K

Back on the Rails with OSETI

The Planetary Society sponsored all-sky optical SETI search at Harvard University went off the rails, telescope roof rails that is, but it is back on track and hunting the sky for ET.



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NASA's Spitzer Telescope Witnesses Asteroid Smashup

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted an eruption of dust around a young star, possibly the result of a smashup between large asteroids. This type of collision can eventually lead to the formation of planets.



August 28, 2014

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NASA’s Big Rocket a Step Closer to Reality

NASA's Space Launch System passed a critical milestone yesterday, but buried within the announcement was news that the first launch could slip by nearly a year.



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House members seek details on SLS/Orion schedules and spending

A day after NASA announced that the first SLS may not be ready for launch until as late as November 2018, two key members of the House Science Committee asked NASA for details on both the schedule and funding levels of the SLS and Orion programs.


In a letter released by the committee Thursday morning, [...]



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Canadian Mars Analogue Mission: Field Report, Week 2

Tanya Harrison wraps up the final week of Mars sample return analogue mission operations at the Canadian Space Agency.



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Artist Concept: Space Launch System Takes Flight



Artist concept of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) 70-metric-ton configuration launching to space. SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever built for deep space missions, including to an asteroid and ultimately to Mars. The first SLS mission -- Exploration Mission 1 -- will launch an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to a stable orbit beyond the moon and bring it back to Earth to demonstrate the integrated system performance of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft’s re-entry and landing prior to a crewed flight. Image credit: NASA/MSFC › Read press release via NASA http://ift.tt/1C6ok6j

Congress and GAO Have Doubts About SLS Costs

Letter to NASA Administrator Bolden from House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Republicans, 27 August 2014 "Will NASA be able to fly the SLS for Exploration Mission-1 in calendar year 2017? If it will not, please explain what has...



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Commercial Crew Program Poll

Marc's note: Last week I decided to run a poll on who our readers thought would be selected for funding in the next round of NASA's Commercial Crew Program which many expect to be announced tomorrow. The results were...



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ISS Daily Summary Report – 08/27/14

Robonaut Leg Installation: Commander (CDR) Swanson temporarily removed the Robonaut front and side torso panels, backpack, and kidney panel in preparation for tomorrow when he will attach the torso and mobility legs. Robonaut is a dexterous humanoid robot designed with the versatility and dexterity to manipulate hardware, exhibit greater endurance than humans and react safely […]



August 28, 2014 at 01:05AM

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2014年8月27日 星期三

Milky Way over Yellowstone



The Milky Way was not created by an evaporating lake. The colorful pool of water, about 10 meters across, is known as Silex Spring and is located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. Illuminated artificially, the colors are caused by layers of bacteria that grow in the hot spring. Steam rises off the spring, heated by a magma chamber deep underneath known as the Yellowstone hotspot. Unrelated and far in the distance, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy arches high overhead, a band lit by billions of stars. The above picture is a 16-image panorama taken late last month. If the Yellowstone hotspot causes another supervolcanic eruption as it did 640,000 years ago, a large part of North America would be affected. via NASA http://ift.tt/1vkWXDR

With an SLS slip looming, one senator wants to keep NASA’s budget “on track”

An announcement Wednesday by NASA that the first launch of the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket could slip by nearly a year has led one key senator to suggest the program needs some budgetary help.


NASA announced Wednesday that the SLS passed its Key Decision Point C (KDP-C) review, an assessment of the [...]



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Selling SLS: Smoke and Mirrors - and Jedi Mind Tricks

Using Jedi Mind Tricks to Sell NASA's Next Big Rocket "Among the things being announced by NASA was that the launch date for the first SLS mission was being slipped to late 2018 from its current 2017 date. But NASA...



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JSC's Girl Robot Lost Competition Due to Broken WiFi

What Happened to NASA's Valkyrie Robot at the DRC Trials, and What's Next, IEEE "At the DRC Trials, Valkyrie experienced a "networking issue" that prevented the team from scoring any points. In the garage before the DRC Trials began, everything...



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NASA Completes Key Review of World’s Most Powerful Rocket in Support of Journey to Mars

NASA officials Wednesday announced they have completed a rigorous review of the Space Launch System (SLS) -- the heavy-lift, exploration class rocket under development to take humans beyond Earth orbit and to Mars -- and approved the program's progression from formulation to development, something no other exploration class vehicle has achieved since the agency built the space shuttle.



August 27, 2014

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The Slate Plus Doctor Who Inaugural Podcast

[Note: Extremely mild spoilers below. I figure I might as well warn you.]


As an unapologetic and enthusiastic Doctor Who fanboy, I’m really happy that the new series has started up. We’re in Season 8 now, with Peter Capaldi now (metaphorically) filling the Doctor’s fez. The first episode just aired, and I thought it was pretty good. I even tweeted it:


So it’s official.


The Hive Overmind at Slate asked if I’d like to do a podcast with various Slate-sters discussing the new episodes of Doctor Who as they air. I said yes—duh—and the first one is now online. I spent about an hour talking Whovianicity with Slate ’s Outward editor and culture critic June Thomas. We talk Clara, Capaldi, robots, Silurians, and why I thought the regeneration was handled pretty well. We also had some fun with a certain locking of lips shown in the episode as well.


Fair warning: The podcast is part of Slate Plus , which is a premium subscription service. It’s five bucks a month, and provides all kinds of fun added content; I’ve written about it before. There’s a lot of great stuff there on top of the usual great stuff at Slate , so I heartily recommend signing up.


If you need another reason, we’ll have a new Doctor Who podcast every week during the season. So join in and be a part of the fun!






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Interesting SLS Briefing Today

NASA Holds Teleconference Today to Discuss Progress on World's Largest Rocket "NASA officials will hold a media teleconference at 4 p.m. EDT today to discuss the agency's progress on the Space Launch System (SLS), the heavy-lift rocket under development to...



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NASA Telescopes Uncover Early Construction of Giant Galaxy

Astronomers have for the first time caught a glimpse of the earliest stages of massive galaxy construction. The building site, dubbed “Sparky,” is a dense galactic core blazing with the light of millions of newborn stars that are forming at a ferocious rate.



August 27, 2014

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NASA Holds Teleconference Today to Discuss Progress on World’s Largest Rocket

NASA officials will hold a media teleconference at 4 p.m. EDT today to discuss the agency’s progress on the Space Launch System (SLS), the heavy-lift rocket under development to take humans beyond Earth orbit and to Mars.



August 27, 2014

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Where does outreach funding go?

Over the past 8 years I've been based in Manchester and Cardiff. During my time in those places I was involved with a few public engagement grants from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). These grants are called "Small Awards" (there has also been a "Large Awards Scheme" in the past) and are open to anyone who wants to promote the science areas covered by STFC. They are awarded in two rounds each year. For instance, I was on a team that got three STFC Small Awards to create and improve the Jodcast.



I've benefited from the STFC Small Awards but something has niggled at me over the years. After each round is complete I look at the list of funded projects and I've noticed that very few were from the area I grew up in - Yorkshire. I've been meaning to check if this was just my perception or was actually a thing and I've finally gotten around to it. I have converted all the PDFs listing previous award winners between 1999-2014 into a simple data table, written some code, and started to visualise the data. Here is a heat map of UK funding scaled by the population in each region.



UK map of STFC funding

Map showing STFC Small Award funding between 1999-2014 scaled by population in each UK region.





These data show that the North East and Yorkshire don't get an equal share of physics outreach funding. It is a little surprising that Leeds - the UK's 3rd largest city - only got 2 outreach grants over a 15 year period. Those were both for a theatre company that did national tours - none involved the university. So is this a bias in STFC? Given the make-up of the Small Award panel I really don't think so. I suspect that the bias is at the application stage with few people from the North East and Yorkshire applying.



If you are from Yorkshire or the North East and want to communicate physics, please consider applying for a Small Award. The next round closes on 9th October 2014 at 4pm BST . Go apply. - taken from Astronomy Blog (http://ift.tt/1g8FhhM)



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An Island Grows in the Ocean

Back in March I posted a Landsat 8 image of a volcano called Nishinoshima, located in the Pacific Ocean about 1,000 kilometers south of Tokyo. Up until late 2013 it was just a dinky island barely poking above the water’s surface. But then a second vent started erupting nearby, rapidly grew in size, and actually engulfed the original volcano.


It’s still growing. This new view from Landsat on Aug. 21, 2014, shows it puffing away:


It’s interesting comparing it to how it looked a few months ago; it’s clearly changed its shape. It’s not growing as rapidly as it once was, apparently, but it’s still getting bigger.


That whole area is loaded with volcanic islands forming seriously long chains across the ocean:


The pin marks the location of Nishinoshima. Of course, that map is scaled way out, covering thousands of kilometers. The original Landsat image gives you a better sense of how lonely the island is out there:


Pretty. And fascinating. It shows that our planet is active, constantly changing, constantly renewing itself. If it didn’t, we’d probably look a lot more like Mars. That’s a pretty amazing planet too, but given its lack of a thick atmosphere, no water, and chilly room temperature, I’ll take Earth every time. I like my environment habitable, even if it means some locally isolated places really aren’t.






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Testing Composite Cryotank Technology For Future Deep Space Missions



NASA has completed a complex series of tests on one of the largest composite cryogenic fuel tanks ever manufactured, bringing the aerospace industry much closer to designing, building, and flying lightweight, composite tanks on rockets. At NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the tank was lowered into a structural test stand where it was tested with cryogenic hydrogen and structural loads to simulate stresses the tank would experience during launch. The project is part of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, which is innovating, developing, testing and flying hardware for use in NASA's future missions. Cryogenic propellants are gasses chilled to subfreezing temperatures and condensed to form highly combustible liquids, providing high-energy propulsion solutions critical to future, long-term human exploration missions beyond low-Earth orbit. In the past, propellant tanks have been fabricated out of metals. Switching from metallic to composite construction holds the potential to dramatically increase the performance capabilities of future space systems through a dramatic reduction in weight. > NASA Completes Successful Battery of Tests on Composite Cryotank Image Credit: NASA/David Olive via NASA http://ift.tt/1sBWCaU

ISS Daily Summary Report – 08/26/14

Robonaut Assembly: Commander (CDR) Swanson set up Robonaut and powered up the hardware to allow the ground team to start a six hour power soak. Tomorrow, Swanson will begin procedures to install legs on Robonaut. Robonaut is a dexterous humanoid robot designed with the versatility and dexterity to manipulate hardware, exhibit greater endurance than humans […]



August 27, 2014 at 01:10AM

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International Postcards from Space

A collection of pretty pictures by cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, who currently serves as a flight engineer aboard the International Space Station.



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2014年8月26日 星期二

Competing for Dollars

We all know NASA needs more money to achieve its goals. But competition for money is intense within the U.S. federal government, and two trends have made it harder for NASA to get what it needs.



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SpaceX Delays AsiaSat 6 - Just To Be Doubly Certain

SpaceX Update on AsiaSat 6 Mission "What we do want to triple-check is whether even highly improbable corner case scenarios have the optimal fault detection and recovery logic. This has already been reviewed by SpaceX and multiple outside agencies, so...



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Europa: How Less Can Be More

Van Kane explains three factors that make exploring Europa hard—factors that can make a mission concept that seems like less actually be more.



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NASA Completes Successful Battery of Tests on Composite Cryotank

NASA has completed a complex series of tests on one of the largest composite cryogenic fuel tanks ever manufactured, bringing the aerospace industry much closer to designing, building, and flying lightweight, composite tanks on rockets.



August 26, 2014

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Air Force starts search for an RD-180 replacement

Although the supply of Russian-built RD-180 engines that power the first stage of the Atlas V do not appear to be in the same level of jeopardy as feared earlier this year—United Launch Alliance took delivery of two of those engines last week—the US Air Force is starting to lay the groundwork for development of [...]



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