A collection of stories tagged 'nasa' from Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/ Copyright 2006 RoomforMilk.com. RoomforMilk is not affiliated with Slashdot.org. Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:36:34 EST A spider that had been sent to the International Space Station for a school science program was lost. Two arachnids were sent in order to know if spiders can survive and make webs in space, but now only one spider can be seen in the container. NASA isn't sure where the other spider could have gone. I, for one, welcome our new arachnid overlords."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26289 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/f_21o0bM1hc/article.pl Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:05:11 EST Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics recently won a contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to design quieter, more energy efficient, and more environmentally friendly commercial airplanes. The two million dollar contract from NASA is just an initial step in bringing green technologies to the sky."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26288 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9je43OYP_q0/article.pl Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:05:07 EST NASA is trying to decide between eight space exploration missions that include further exploring Venus and comet composition as well landing on an asteroid or examining the space around Jupiter. The space agency today began accepting solicitations for these space exploration opportunities and will ultimately pick one of them to begin perusing in 2009 with a launch date targeted at 2018. The solicitations and ultimate expedition are part of NASA's New Frontiers program, which has as its main objective to explore the solar system with medium-class spacecraft missions that will conduct high-quality, focused scientific investigations, NASA said. The first New Frontiers mission was selected in 2003 and will result in the launch of Juno, a Jupiter polar orbiter mission set to blast off in 2011."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26281 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qqKyFsk7spY/article.pl Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:05:01 EST NASA press release states that 'At approx. 3:33 p.m. EST, Piper reported that one of the Braycote lubrication guns had released grease into her toolbag. As she was cleaning the bag and wiping the tools and equipment inside, the bag floated away. Another bag carrying identical equipment is now being shared by Piper and Bowen.' Luckily they had a spare."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26272 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/miKI_RAn3BE/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:05:45 EST NASA and its industry partners organized a two-week lunar in-situ resource utilization field test in Hawaii. The tested machines included a few different rovers and prototype plants for generating oxygen and water from lunar regolith. Astrotoday has a picture gallery and a video report. This follows on the heels of the recent ESA lunar robotics challenge event held on Tenerife, which tasked student teams to build a lunar robot that would be able to search for water ice in lunar polar craters."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26269 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/aiZv2Xwf0MY/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:05:38 EST NASA and its industry partners organized a two-week lunar in-situ resource utilization field test in Hawaii. The tested machines included a few different rovers and prototype plants for generating oxygen and water from lunar regolith. Astrotoday has picture gallery and video report. This follows on the heels of recent ESA lunar robotics challenge event held on Tenerife, which tasked student teams to build a lunar robot that would be able to search for water ice in lunar polar craters."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26254 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/aiZv2Xwf0MY/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:05:10 EST NASA press release states that 'At approx. 3:33 p.m. EST, Piper reported that one of the Braycote lubrication guns had released grease into her toolbag. As she was cleaning the bag and wiping the tools and equipment inside, the bag floated away. Another bag carrying identical equipment is now being shared by Piper and Bowen.' Luckily they had a spare."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26249 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/miKI_RAn3BE/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:05:01 EST NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. The store-and-forward protocol was designed by NASA in consultation with Vint Cerf. Here's a discussion from last July before the test began."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26241 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/wqH8M3f9FUE/article.pl Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:05:01 EST An international team of scientists who analyzed data from the Gamma Ray Spectrometer onboard NASA's Mars Odyssey reports new evidence for the controversial idea that oceans once covered about a third of ancient Mars. We compared Gamma Ray Spectrometer data on potassium, thorium and iron above and below a shoreline believed to mark an ancient ocean that covered a third of Mars' surface, and an inner shoreline believed to mark a younger, smaller ocean."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26227 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/KeaEOve3KQ8/article.pl Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:05:02 EST Astronauts flying aboard space shuttle Endeavour are delivering a device to the International Space Station that may leave you wondering if NASA is taking recycling too far. Among the ship's cargo is a water regeneration system that distills, filters, ionizes, and oxidizes wastewater — including urine — into fresh water for drinking or, as one astronaut puts it, 'will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee.' The US space agency spent $250M for the water recycling equipment but with the space shuttles due to retire in two years, NASA needed to make sure the station crew would have a good supply of fresh water. The Environmental Control and Life Support Systems uses a purification process called vapor compression distillation: urine is boiled until the water in it turns to steam. In space, there's an additional challenge: steam doesn't rise, so the entire distillation system is spun to create artificial gravity to separate the steam from the brine. The water has been thoroughly tested on Earth, including blind taste tests that pitted recycled urine with similarly treated tap water. 'Some people may think it's downright disgusting, but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth,' said Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26222 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/et9m8s-slwA/article.pl Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:05:08 EST The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26202 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/-dvQBCdgxXc/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:05:01 EST NASA has built a new software package to track problems with the Space Shuttle using open source tools from Mozilla. '[Alonso Vera, the lead of the Ames Human-Computer Interaction Group] wouldn't say exactly how much the new systems cost to build, but he said they were an order of magnitude cheaper than what was being used before, closer to $100,000 than the $1 million it would have cost in the past.' The Space Shuttle Endeavor launched successfully on Friday, so the new system is being used to track any problems which may crop up in the current mission. As one commentator pointed out, 'A system like this could save more than money; it could save lives.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26195 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/71TMekbOdu4/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 11:05:01 EST From delaying Project Constellation to an additional $2 billion in funding, Space.com looks at some immediate decisions the President Elect will have to make once he takes office in January. The biggest one will be the shuttle plan: do we retire the shuttle fleet or keep it on for more missions? If it is retired, we would have to rely on another country to bring our astronauts into space between 2010 and 2015 as a new fleet is built. Will Obama hold true on his $2 billion pledge to NASA?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26162 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/2D9UjzxdtJw/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:05:04 EST Toren Altair writes with this excerpt from a story at The Space Fellowship: "NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit communicated via the Mars Odyssey orbiter today right at the time when ground controllers had told it to, prompting shouts of 'She's talking!' among the rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 'This means Spirit has not gone into a fault condition and is still being controlled by sequences we send from the ground,' said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26152 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/WAqDNxDFLto/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:05:01 EST Just days after announcing that the Mars Phoenix Lander has met its icy demise, NASA reports that a dust storm has left the rover Spirit on the edge of power failure. During one recent Martian day, the robotic geologist's solar array produced only 89 watt hours of energy, the lowest output by either rover in their nearly five years on Mars. Mission managers are taking steps to protect the hardy, battle-worn spacecraft, but the agency describes Spirit's status as 'vulnerable.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26128 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/fck7FkNXG-c/article.pl Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:05:15 EST SpuriousLogic sends in a sad note from the BBC: "NASA says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead. Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth. Phoenix, which landed on the planet's northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold and dark of an advancing winter. The US space agency says it will continue to try to contact the craft but does not expect to hear from it."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26086 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/BG-z_a6KyxA/article.pl Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:05:05 EST An archiving error by NASA has meant 173 data tapes have sat in Perth for almost 40 years, holding information about lunar dust that could be vital in expanding science's understanding of the moon. But after almost four decades, a donation from a Sydney computer society looks set to breathe fresh life into a long-neglected field of lunar science. ... These were the only active measurements of moon dust made during the Apollo missions, and no-one thought it was important. ... Mr Holmes has kept the tapes in a climate-controlled room since then, and it was only when he stumbled upon a 1960s IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive at the Australian Computer Museum that his company had the ability to unlock the information."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26071 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ol9XhiAEdN8/article.pl Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:05:04 EST The ESA unveiled the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle, a real re-entry vehicle. Although it will not be reused, it has a better geometry than NASA's Orion or the Russian Soyuz, giving better lift, and control. This is not done by the addition of useless wings, but by using two brakes. Finally a departure from the Apollo design that is actually better?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25977 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/aNmFV2yIJME/article.pl Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:05:01 EST NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars which emit purely in gamma rays. A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star, and of the nearly 1,800 cataloged so far, only a small fraction emit at frequencies higher than radio waves. The gamma-ray-only pulsar, which lies within a supernova remnant known as CTA 1, is silent across parts of the electromagnetic spectrum where pulsars are normally found, indicating a new class of pulsars. It is located 'about 4,600 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. Its lighthouse-like beam sweeps Earth's way every 316.86 milliseconds. The pulsar, which formed in a supernova explosion about 10,000 years ago, emits 1,000 times the energy of our sun.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25928 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/NPEG9z2Sc7E/article.pl Sun, 02 Nov 2008 12:05:01 EST A refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia, tossed from the international space station last year, is expected to hit earth tomorrow afternoon or evening. The 1,400-pound object was deliberately jettisoned — by hand — from the ISS's robot arm in July 2007. Since the time of re-entry is uncertain, so is the location. "NASA expects up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the searing hot temperatures of re-entry, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms). ... [T]he largest pieces could slam into the Earth's surface at about 100 mph (161 kph). ...'If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25920 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/rAZ_BwbKJ50/article.pl Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:05:02 EDT Scientists have discovered evidence of magnetic portals connecting the Earth and the Sun every 8 minutes. 'Several speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth's magnetic field presses against the sun's magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect," forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency's fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA's five THEMIS probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25906 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/L3y3b7CK_WE/article.pl Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:05:01 EDT A joint project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center has developed a highly modified Boeing-747SP aircraft to carry a 2.5-meter (98.4 inch) infrared telescope. The project SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy) will observe radiation in the wavelengths from 0.3 microns to 1.0 millimeters, spanning the visible, infrared, and sub-millimeter portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The observations will be taken at an altitude of 40,000 to 45,000 feet (12 to 14 km) which is above 99.8 percent of the water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, thus giving it a greater range of observations."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25890 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/-S3g-jpOq-4/article.pl Fri, 31 Oct 2008 09:05:09 EDT Just a couple of days after the orbiting observatory was brought back online, Hubble aimed its prime working camera, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), at a particularly intriguing target, a pair of gravitationally interacting galaxies called Arp 147. The image demonstrated that the camera is working exactly as it was before going offline, thereby scoring a 'perfect 10 both for performance and beauty.' (Meanwhile, the slowly declining Mars Rover has now entered safe mode, according to reader CraftyJack.)Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25880 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/umnuPiAxpYk/article.pl Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:05:10 EDT It's the beginning of the end for the Phoenix Mars Lander. As winter approaches in the Martian arctic, NASA says it's in a 'race against time and the elements' in its efforts to prolong the robotic spacecraft's life. Starting today, mission managers will begin to gradually shut the lander's systems down, hoping to conserve dwindling solar power and thereby extend the remaining systems' useful life. 'Originally scheduled to last 90 days, Phoenix has completed a fifth month of exploration in the Martian arctic. As expected, with the Martian northern hemisphere shifting from summer to fall, the lander is generating less power due to shorter days and fewer hours of sunlight reaching its solar panels. At the same time, the spacecraft requires more power to run several survival heaters that allow it to operate even as temperatures decline.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25863 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/vR3-Tzs8x3s/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:06:36 EDT It's the beginning of the end for the Phoenix Mars Lander. As winter approaches in the Martian arctic, NASA says it's in a 'race against time and the elements' in its efforts to prolong the robotic spacecraft's life. Starting today, mission managers will begin to gradually shut the lander's systems down, hoping to conserve dwindling solar power and thereby extend the remaining systems' useful life. 'Originally scheduled to last 90 days, Phoenix has completed a fifth month of exploration in the Martian arctic. As expected, with the Martian northern hemisphere shifting from summer to fall, the lander is generating less power due to shorter days and fewer hours of sunlight reaching its solar panels. At the same time, the spacecraft requires more power to run several survival heaters that allow it to operate even as temperatures decline.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25834 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/vR3-Tzs8x3s/article.pl Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:05:06 EDT