Eclectic junk from the four corners of the ‘Net. And pictures too!
Come tomorrow, November 8th, many people (check the link for locations) will have the chance to see the inner most planet of our solar system make an attempt to eclipse the sun. This transit is a some what rare occurrence, as only about 13 will happen in the next 100 years. So grab your approved solar viewing gear and have at it!
SPACE.com — Viewer’s Guide: Watch Mercury Cross the Sun (warning, popups)
Wikipedia – Transit of Mercury
Now this is a lovely photo set of early slides from the Apollo space program. There were so many hopes and dreams back then weren’t there? Maybe the next 50 years will bring these dreams to full realization.
One commenter made this remark:
"This slide, as well as two others you have posted, were used in a presentation by M. W. Rosen and F. C. Schwenk at the Tenth International Astronautical Congress in London, England, August 31, 1959."
[via boingboing]
NASA dawn of the Apollo program slides – a photoset on Flickr
When I read the book Project Orion
[via boingboing]
Comming soon to a sports network soon I hope. I’ve seen a few air races on TV and it’s hard to how they could go much faster. Seeing a prop plane zip around a pylon at 300 MPH and pull 8 Gs is impressive enough, I can’t wait to see them do that with rocket powered planes.
Recently, the space probe Cassini sent back a mess (over 160) images taken with it’s wide field camera that were assembled into this breath taking image of our solar systems premiere ringed planet Saturn. The color enhanced image (shown here) shows not only the rings we are used to seeing but others that are too faint to be seen normally.
[via boingboing]
This so reminds me to the high altitude research project that was dreamt up by Gerald Bull. Bull had this idea that he could build the gigantic gun that would shoot satellites into space like something out of a Jules Vern book. He came close, he was able to loft a 330 pound round about 60 miles off the Earth. He was assassinated in 1990 after making some rather poor choices in the countries that he dealt with. Ah, he would have loved this concept. LaunchPoint Technologies has this idea would utilize a 1-1/4 mile superconducting ring to, over the course of several hours, accelerate a sled with a 22lb payload to a speed of 5 miles a second. The payload would then separate from the sled and be ‘fired’ through a tunnel that is angled 30 degrees up. The projectile would be moving at over 23 times the speed of sound at this point and the next stop would be low Earth orbit. The payload would only have to survive around 2000G but it’s pointed out that laser guided artillery rounds routinely survive forces of over 20,000G. So far it’s just a theoretical design but if it works it could bring the cost per pound to launch hardware into space down to Earth.
[via jwz]
Huge ‘launch ring’ to fling satellites into orbit