Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Brighten up your desktop with stunning shot of science imagery. Over 80 to choose from at various dimensions to fit even the most ’embiggened’ of monitors. There are even instructions on how to apply this as a desktop to your computer if you were wondering how that sort of thing was done. Space craft, planets, satellite pictures of Earth, there are enough pretty pictures to make most everyone happy.
Space Wallpaper, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Moon, Stars and Galaxies – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Very nice, I like the part about the propellant being frozen while it’s being loaded into the motor.
Researchers are developing a new type of rocket propellant made of a frozen mixture of water and “nanoscale aluminum” powder that is more environmentally friendly than conventional propellants and could be manufactured on the moon, Mars and other water-bearing bodies.
New aluminum-water rocket propellant promising for future space missions.
Imagine if you had a head as larger than a planet, OK good. Now imagine that you are looking up at the ‘sky’ (with your head being larger than the planet you normally live on some would say that the sky is everywhere but I digress…) and things that would normally appear flat begin to have depth. You can see that the moon is closer to you than the sun and that planets really do look like they are way out there. Astronomer JP Metsavainio has been taking wonderful photos of the night sky and then enhancing them to give you the illusion of what they would look like it you were of a galactic size. His estimates of depth are a best guess but I’m going to say that for the sake of argument that he is correct. Seeing these nebula and galaxies with stereo depth is just cool.
Like a scene from the Japanese TV series “Planetes“, a Russian and US satellite have collided in orbit. Early in February a non functional Russian military satellite (Kosmos 2251) and a US Iridium communications satellite occurred temporarily disrupting the Iridium communications network. An on orbit spare will be brought into service within the next 30 days. So far this isi the first accident of it’s kind, where a satellites has struck another satellite and not just orbital debris (paint chips, fuel tanks, etc) hitting working space hardware. There was that Chinese missile test where they destroyed a non functional weather bird but that was intentional (and also caused quite a mes up there). Hopefully the junk left from the recent accident will burn up, if not it will become part of the cloud of over 17,000 objects that are currently tracked by ground stations.
Original story:
Russian and US satellites collide
These are so fantastic! As a fan of the ‘golden age of science fiction‘, this is what I envision spacecraft of that imagined far flung future would look like.
Cool Rockets is a line of resin-cast, hand-finished rocket ships, all inspired by the styles of the 40’s and 50’s rockets from comics, TV, and toys. Created by Jeff Brewer, a film and special-effects modelmaker in northern California, Cool Rockets offer a unique collection that is handmade, unique, and more affordable than you’d think. All the designs are original inspirations of an era, not copies of some vehicle you’ve seen in a movie or TV show.
Well done Hubble!
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken the first visible-light snapshot of a planet circling another star. The team of astronomers who made the discovery includes researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter’s mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis, or the “Southern Fish.”