You are browsing the archive for Ryan Anderson.
6 October 2008
NASA + YouTube = Awesome
NASA has put out some excellent new YouTube videos. Music videos. I’ll let them speak/sing for themselves: And when a music video doesn’t work: cute kids!
Mercury Flyby!
The MESSENGER probe flew by Mercury for the second time last night, coming only 200 km from the planet’s surface. Since MESSENGER is so close to the sun, NASA engineers had to compensate for the fact that the intense sunlight produces a force on the spacecraft. In essence, MESSENGER was acting like a small solar sail! The picture shown above was taken yesterday during the approach, but I’ll post the …
2 October 2008
Carnival of Space #73 – NASA Birthday Edition
NASA is legendary for its numerous and sometimes unnecessary acronyms. (My personal favorite is IDD – instrument deployment device, also known as the arm on the MER rovers.) That’s why it is fitting that this week’s carnival of space is one huge acronym commemorating NASA’s birthday! Go check it out at Alice’s Astro Info!
Happy Birthday NASA!
Today marks the 50th birthday of NASA! Nancy Atkinson over at Universe Today has a very nice post reflecting on the past five decades of space exploration. Rather than repeat what she wrote, I’ll just provide you with these space-exploration-related quotes: “To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.” -Stephen Hawking “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring …
1 October 2008
Jules Verne Burns Up!
No, not the pioneering french sci-fi author. The robotic European “space freighter” that autonomously docked with the ISS a while back. It had outlived its use on the ISS, so it was filled with waste, detached and sent into a controlled re-entry. At 20 metric tons, it made for quite the fireworks show:
29 September 2008
Phoenix Sees Snow and Carbonates on Mars!
Big news from the Phoenix lander! A new JPL press release just came out, announcing the detection of snow and carbonates on Mars! From the press release: A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft’s landing site. Data show the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground. “Nothing like this …
What can $700 Billion Buy?
With all the talk about the government bailout in the news right now, I got to thinking about just how much money $700 billion dollars is. So here are some depressing numbers. $700,000,000,000 = 1.25 Iraq Wars (based on the ~$558 billion cost shown at this site at 12:30 am EDT on Sept 29, 2008) or 5 Apollo Programs (at ~$135 billion inflation-adjusted dollars for the entire program from conception …
28 September 2008
Geology in Spaaaaace
It turns out that there is a geology blog carnival too called the Accretionary Wedge! Even better, this week’s theme is “Geology in Spaaaace“! So head on over to Good Schist for some excellent space-related geology posts!
26 September 2008
Carnival of Space #72
It’s friday, and that means it’s Carnival of Space Time! This week the Carnival is being hosted over at Twisted Physics. Go check it out!
