Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Pretty cool, depending on the time of day you can see a nice time laps of the fires in Arizona.
This is from the GOES-12 satellite in the visible spectrum, so it will be dark about half the time. Arizona is -7GMT so if you catch it in the morning and evening it should be pretty cool.
NASA/MSFC Interactive GOES Data Selector
This plan reminds me of a book by Piers Anthony called “Rings of Ice”. Things didn’t work out all that well, the Earth ended up getting flooded with all the comet ice that was used to build the rings.
The idea in sounds too close to the ice ring idea to me. Putting lots of little hunks of stuff in orbit to me sounds like a big mistake. Wouldn’t the rings be right where all of our telecom satellites are at right now? Plus as it might light up the night time sky as much as a full moon, wouldn’t that have an effect on the animals (and us!) that live here?
As long as we’re taking about potential bad things to do to our home world, what about building shadow squares? At least those would be farther away from the Earth and thus out of the way of most things we put in to orbit. We might figure out a way to turn them off or somthing if they end up working a little too well…
Now, if someone wants to build a sun screen to put over Phoenix I’d be all over that. It’s &%#% hot here!
Space Ring Could Shade Earth and Stop Global Warming
Well, better luck next time…
Russians search Arctic for wreck of missing solar sail spacecraft
If you looking to burn some time or test out that new printer you bought, take of look at the ‘Great Images In NASA’ site. They have everything from photos of computers, robots, rockets, space craft, astronauts, and historic photos of all kinds. There are even some Soviet photos in there.
GRIN is a collection of over a thousand images of significant historical interest scanned at high-resolution in several sizes. This collection is intended for the media, publishers, and the general public looking for high-quality photographs. Please note that downloading these image files may take some time, although searching and browsing should be relatively quick
Atomic enery is the only way to explore the stars. People whine about how nuclear energy is unsafe, how if one of these probes were to crash land on Earth that all of us would be dead from cancer in a year, or that we can’t go poluting space with all this radiation (yes, I have spoken with someone that actualy said that).
That’s a load of crap. Space has quite enough radiation of it’s own that us adding to it won’t matter ar all. No, we can’t use that radiation to power our spaceships (yet) but we can build what is called an RTG to generate power for the space craft quite safely. The RTG program was started in the days before Apollo and has been used on various missions including the both Viking Mars landers.
Sending a probe to Pluto is a once in a lifetime chance – unless there is a major breakthrough in the area of propulsion – the planet is just too far away.
I hope that in the next few years more spacecraft are fitted with nuclear power systems so the space craft are not hobbled by an amazingly small power budget. With enough power a probe around Jupiter could send back a thousand times more information and use envasive sensing like deep radar and laser altimiter measuring. Heck, I would’nt be all that amazed if near live video could be sent back from the surface of a distant moon.
A Nuclear Space Battery To Go To Pluto
As the ISS slowly grows in size the astronauts that crew it are going to have work loads even greater than they have now. Because of budget problems the seven man crew was cut two three men and sometimes only two.
Small semi autonomous devices like this could prove to be a valuable aid in getting tasks done faster and with less stress on the crew while on EVA. So far NASA has concentrated on little robots that are inside the crew space and zip around with little fans. This will be able to be extra ‘eyes’ for the ground controllers so they can get a better view on how things look on the surface of the station or even a docked shuttle. Anything that can keep a manned EVA off the schedule is a good thing, space is a dangerous place!
However, I have seen how a device that is supposed to save you time and make life easier can do just the opposite. My PDA (Viewsonic V36) has cause an untold amount of annoyance and stress when I try to get it to do something that is clearly SHOULD be able to do but can’t. This would be ActiveSync with my XP laptop. But I digress, as long as these are over seen by a ground station and causes no additional work load on the crew, everything should be ok.
The little guys are quite amazing, below is a short list of technology that it will have onboard:
Technology innovations include rechargeable xenon gas propulsion, a rechargeable lithium ion battery, custom avionics based on the PowerPC 740/750 microprocessor, “camera-on-a-chip” imagers with video compression, micro electromechanical system gyroscopes, precise relative GPS navigation, digital radio frequency communications, micro-patch antennas, digital instrumentation networking and compact mechanical packaging.
NASA’s New ‘Nanosatellite’ Systems
(It was also seen on MAKE a little while ago.)