Tag Archives: NASA

The unmanned rocket carried supplies for the ISS. The evening launch from Virginia was to have been visible to millions on the East Coast and many media outlets hyped the viewing today to their readers.

Via the New York Times: NASA’s latest Mars spacecraft, Maven, arrived Sunday evening to study the mystery of what happened to the planet’s air. After a 33-minute engine firing, mission controllers received acknowledgment at about 10:25 p.m. Eastern time that Maven was in orbit around Mars. After a six-week period to turn on and check systems on the spacecraft and …

The US Navy has christened its new ship named after late astronaut Sally Ride in a ceremony featuring her partner of 27 years. Dr. Tam O’Shaughnessy, ship’s sponsor for the auxiliary general oceanographic research (AGOR) vessel R/V Sally Ride (AGOR 28), breaks a bottle across the bow during a christening ceremony at the Dakota Creek Industries, Inc., shipyard in Anacortes, …

“I’m shocked at the countless hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent over the years in the desperate and fruitless search for extraterrestrial life. Of course, secularists are desperate to find life in outer space, as they believe that would provide evidence that life can evolve in different locations and given the supposed right conditions! The search for …

Via the Telegraph: Solar flares, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs) belch huge clouds of superheated particles from the sun’s corona – the wispy, outermost and hottest layer – and can reach speeds exceeding one million miles per hour. The CME, captured on May 9, 2014, was the first seen by NASA’s new Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS. To capture …

The International Space Station has launched a live stream. One of the latest missions from the ISS is kind of amazing. The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment consists of four cameras that have been attached outside of the ISS. Though temperature is controlled, the cameras are exposed to the radiation from the sun, which will allow astronauts to understand …

NASA wants you to step outside on Tuesday and send them an Earth Day selfie. For the first time in more than a decade, five NASA Earth-observing missions will be launched into space in a single year. To celebrate this milestone, NASA is inviting people all around the world to step outside on Earth Day, April 22, take a “selfie,” …

There’s a moon in the sky. It’s called the moon. 

Via the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Touring the Milky Way now is as easy as clicking a button with NASA’s new zoomable, 360-degree mosaic presented Thursday at the TEDActive 2014 Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The star-studded panorama of our galaxy is constructed from more than 2 million infrared snapshots taken over the past 10 years by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. “If …

Yesterday Tam O’Shaughnessy accepted the Presidential Medal Of Freedom on behalf of her late partner, Sally Ride. This afternoon the White House posted the below clip to their official YouTube channel. As of this writing, there’s no clip from Walter Naegle, who accepted yesterday on behalf of his late partner, Bayard Rustin.

Accepting the medals on behalf of their late partners were Tam O’Shaughnessy (Sally Ride) and Walter Naegle (Bayard Rustin). Both presentations were preceded by the off-stage announcer recounting the contributions made by Ride and Rustin to the history of the LGBT movement. The live stream has now concluded.

“It’s scary to be open because you don’t realized the impact that it might have on so many aspects of your life. You worry about grants, about whether you’ll be able to continue writing children’s textbooks; we were scared that if sponsors knew the founders of Sally Ride Science were two lesbians, if that would affect our organization. I wanted …

NASA explains today’s photo: The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (aka M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual skygazers can’t appreciate the galaxy’s impressive extent in planet Earth’s …

(Via Towleroad)

President Obama revealed yesterday that he will honor late astronaut Sally Ride with the Medal Of Freedom. Via White House press release: The Medal of Freedom is the Nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant …

In what may be the coolest clip I’ve ever seen, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield bid farewell to his time on the International Space Station with the below version of David Bowie’s classic, Space Oddity.  Best comment on YouTube: “Most expensive music video ever.”  CNET has more: Mixed with the help of staff at the Canadian Space Agency, musician Emm Gryner, …

Another photo from Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. I’m at the yellow dot.

NASA explains: In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two …

(Via Buzzfeed Andrew)