You may know what the inside of a cab looks like - but what’s it like inside a space taxi? This cosy scene provides a glimpse of how astronauts may soon be making their way to the International Space Station (ISS). It shows the inside of a prototype Dragon space capsule, made by the company SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, which has just completed two sets of two-day tests in which NASA astronauts and its own staff tried out mock missions.
Short Sharp Science: Peek inside a next-generation SpaceX taxi
the evolution of the moon
Witness the Moon’s breathtaking 4.5-billion-year evolution in less than three minutes
When we gaze up at the Moon, we expect a certain degree of consistency. Sure, it moves through its phases, shifting in and out of darkness over the course of the month, but generally speaking, the Moon’s surface looks the same to us — night after night, year after year. But the Moon has not always looked the way it does now.
In the last 4.5 billion years, the Moon has transformed from a roiling mass of ejected terrestrial matter, to an unblemished orb, to the heavily cratered, volcanic-crust laden entity we know and love today. We know these things occurred because the Moon’s surface features tell a story, and for close to three years now, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been getting an up close look at what those features have to say.
Now, the folks at NASA’s Goddard Multimedia team have used the latest data on the Moon’s history, acquired by LRO, to packr 4.5 billion years of lunar evolution into the stunning video you see up top.
This is the latest in a series of really beautiful work from the Goddard Visualization Studio. You can check our more of their work over at the Goddard Space Flight Center website.
(via itsfullofstars)
explore the universe on a multitouch screen.
David Brown | NUIverse | 2012 (by surface)
Comet Lovejoy + Total Recall
NASA’s footage of the International Space Station rounding planet Earth to catch a glimpse of the comet Lovejoy, set to a piece of Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the movie Total Recall. The result is breathtaking.
Bernal sphere
A Bernal sphere is a type of space habitat intended as a long-term home for permanent residents, first proposed in 1929 by John Desmond Bernal. Bernal’s original proposal described a hollow spherical shell 1.6 km in diameter, with a target population of 20,000 to 30,000 people.
A modified version by Gerard Kitchen O’Neill, Island One, would have a diameter of only 500m rotating at 1.9 RPM to produce a full Earth artificial gravity at the sphere’s equator. The result would be an interior landscape that would resemble a large valley running all the way around the equator of the sphere. Island One would be capable of providing living and recreation space for a population of approximately ten thousand people, with a “Crystal Palace” habitat used for agriculture.
Sunlight was to be provided to the interior of the sphere using external mirrors to direct it in through large windows near the poles. The form of a sphere was chosen for its optimum ability to contain air pressure and its optimum mass-efficiency at providing radiation shielding.
Another version, Island Two, would be approximately 1800m in diameter, yielding an equatorial circumference of nearly six and a half kilometers. At this size, the habitat could comfortably house a population of some 140,000 people. The size was driven by economics: the habitat was to be small enough to allow for efficient transportation within the habitat and large enough to support an efficient industrial base.
(via itsfullofstars)
Time-lapse of a whole night at the ALMA Array Operations Site (AOS), located at 5000 meters altitude on the Chajnantor plateau, in the II Region of Chile. As the Moon sets at the beginning of the night, three of the first ALMA antennas start tests as part of the ongoing Commissioning and Science Verification process. Because they are pointing at the same target in the sky at any moment, their movements are perfectly synchronized.
As the sky appears to rotate clockwise around the south celestial pole (roughly on the upper left edge of the video), the Milky Way goes down slowly, until it is lying almost horizontal before sunrise. The center of our galaxy becomes visible during the second half of the night as a yellowish bulge crossed by dark lanes in the center of the image, just above the antennas.
The flashes on the ground are the car lights of the guards patrolling at the AOS. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is the largest astronomical project in existence and is a truly global partnership between the scientific communities of East Asia, Europe and North America with Chile. ESO is the European partner in ALMA.
This zoom video sequence starts with the spectacular view of the central parts of the Milky Way. As we close in on the constellation of Scorpius, one of the richest parts of the sky, many clusters and nebula appear. The final sequence closes in on an apparently unremarkable star, IRAS 17163-3907, which has been found by recent VLT observations to be a rare yellow hypergiant star, surrounded by two shells.
This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) was taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on Aug. 26, 2011, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. It was taken by the spacecraft’s onboard camera, JunoCam. The solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Aug. 5 to begin a five-year journey to Jupiter.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Andrew Kolb´s Space Oddity children´s book
“Have you ever listened to a song and your mind’s eye is immediately filled with visuals? David Bowie’s classic space epic is one such song for me. Every lyric paints such a vivid picture that I figured ‘Oh hey, I guess I’ll make that into a children’s book!’ Yes, I talk like this. Although I haven’t heard from Mr. Bowie (yet), why wait to share the full book?”
