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Technology

Web's Eulogy for the Phoenix Mars Lander

By Jeremy Hsu Posted on 11.10.2008 10 Comments
NASA has begun bidding a planned goodbye to its Phoenix Mars Lander. The lander relies on solar panels and the sun's golden touch to reawaken it each day, but a dust storm has hastened the end in the face of the oncoming Martian winter.

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11.15.2008 at 02:34pm - Comment by cloud2299

What yu say is true mike cook. But can you imagne the mess it would make if it blew up on launch? I think solar power is the best way to go for now. At least until we can improve other more reliable and stable power sources.
Technology

Phoenix Lander Gallery

By Posted on 5.27.2008 3 Comments

11.5.2008 at 05:37pm - Comment by cloud2299

They are probably trying to figure out what the heck the mini-DVD is too. "Hmmmm. Can we eat this? I wonder." And then when they try to eat the DVD, they'll get sick, and then declare war on earth.
Technology

The Next Space Thruster

By Posted on 1.22.2008 1 Comments
NASA's Ion Engine 1. Charge the Fuel Xenon is an inert gas, seemingly useless for rocketry. Before it´s used as fuel, the engine must convert it into an electrically charged gas, also called a plasma. An electron emitter fires electrons at the xenon gas. When an electron hits a xenon atom, it strips off an additional electron from the atom´s shell to create a positively charged xenon ion.

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11.5.2008 at 05:12pm - Comment by cloud2299

This is so cool. It's like science fiction come to life. I love it. So I guess the old saying is true,"Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact."
Technology

Junkyard on the Moon

By Posted on 1.22.2008 2 Comments

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11.5.2008 at 04:47pm - Comment by cloud2299

Kind of makes you wonder where future generations are going to put all this stuff when we start colonizing the moon. We better send up a bulldozer first to push it all up in a pile. Too bad there's no recycling centers on the moon yet. There's no telling what we could build out of the scrap laying around up there.
Technology

Disabled U.S. Satellite Reportedly Shot Down

By Posted on 2.21.2008 2 Comments
Last night at approximately 10:26 EST, after a long buildup of preparations, the Navy took the controversial step of shooting down a dead U.S. reconnaissance satellite from its low-Earth orbit. The satellite, which is about the size of a school bus, was destroyed to prevent a potentially hazardous impact with Earth, the military has said. It was moving faster than 17,000 mph at an altitude of 133 nautical miles above the Pacific when a modified SM-3 anti-ballistic missile launched from the USS Lake Erie, a Ticonderoga-class AEGIS missile cruiser, reportedly made impact.

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11.5.2008 at 03:04pm - Comment by cloud2299

What the hell does the amount of fuel have to do with it? The satellite was dead, so it wasn't going to use up the fuel that it had.The fuel tank contaained hydrazine propellant, which is highly toxic. Also, the tank was designed to withstand the force of re-entry, but not the force of an impact of that magnitude if it had fallen to earth. It could have potentially killed many people when it hit if they hadn't destroyed it before it came through the atmosphere.
Technology

Signs of Life Found Orbiting an Exoplanet–Sort of

By Posted on 3.20.2008 9 Comments
Everyone seems to be double-extra-cautiously optimistic about this finding, so dont go running out to your telescope tonight looking for greetings from friendly space creatures. But in work reported today in Nature, astronomers say they used the Hubble Space Telescopes infrared imager to pick up signs of methane in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a star some 63 million light years from Earth. And methane, an organic molecule, is an indicator of the possible presence of life.

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11.5.2008 at 02:52pm - Comment by cloud2299

The article said,"methane, an organic molecule, is an indicator of the possible presence of life." It didn't say there couldn't be life because of methane. The probability of no life is due to the closeness of the planet's sun. This is really cool. I think it's great that scientists can detect what's in a planet's atmosphere from so far away.
Technology

A New Earth?

By Posted on 6.6.2008 16 Comments
The search for a planet analogous to our own has taken one step closer with the discovery of the smallest extrasolar planet yet orbiting a star which could support life. It is about three and one-third times the size of Earth, much more in line with our home than the gas giants on the scale of Jupiter or Saturn we had been finding up to this point. (An even smaller planet has so far been found, but it is orbiting a pulsar. Pulsars spew highly powerful radiation, so it's highly unlikely that anything within their vicinity could survive).

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11.5.2008 at 02:15pm - Comment by cloud2299

To start with, the planet they were talking about might support life is not the one orbiting the pulsar. And they did not say "it can't support life because of the radiation". They said it was "highly unlikely" that it could support life due to the massive radiation. The planet speculated to have water,"orbits a dwarf star, which is many thousands of times less bright that our Sun. Still, the planet could have a thick atmosphere—like Venus—which would insulate what little heat was available." They never said there was life there, only that it could possibly support life. They don't even know what the atmosphere is actually like. It's all just speculation at this point. I think some people need to learn to read the entire article and not just the title if you're going to comment. At least that way, you might know what you're commenting on instead of throwing random thoughts out that have nothing to do whatsoever with the material content.
Technology

Three Earth-like Planets Discovered

By Posted on 6.23.2008 4 Comments
When it launches in 2009, NASA's Kepler Mission will include the most sensitive detection system ever put into service for discovering exosolar planets. In the meantime, our toolkit on Earth is getting better with each passing year. Astronomers using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at La Silla Observatory in Chile have discovered three new rocky planets orbiting a single star, all within ten times the size of Earth.

11.5.2008 at 01:53pm - Comment by cloud2299

Ummm. Am I missing something here, or did the article just say that they found three planets similar in size to earth? I apparentely missed the part where they said the planets had breathable atmospheres, landmasses, and probably the most important part, water. Duh!! Learn to read the whole story people. Not just the title.
Technology

Robots That Hunt in Packs

By John Brandon Posted on 11.7.2008 20 Comments
The Department of Defense has put out a call: design a pack of robots. A so-called Multi-Robot Pursuit System would be used to "search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject." Each robot has to weigh 100 kilograms or less, act autonomously (with a human squad leader), negotiate obstacles, and provide immediate feedback. The robots would report back to a human operator, and defer to that human when the robot AI determines that a "difficult decision" is required.

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11.5.2008 at 12:49pm - Comment by cloud2299

Is this the roots for Cyberdyne and Skynet? Let's hope not.
Science

Tiny Naked Astronauts

By Molika Ashford Posted on 9.9.2008 6 Comments
In space, no one can hear a tardigrade scream. They can, however see the tiny organisms (also called water bears) survive a trip through that icy, radiation filled void relatively unscathed.

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11.5.2008 at 12:45pm - Comment by cloud2299

Cool!! Water bears in space. Ain't that great!! Who knew they were such hardy little critters?