Places & Events
These robots are out of this world
It may have lacked the destructive mayhem of a BattleBots competition, but the 2015 Sample Return Robot Challenge also just may hold the key in furthering our space exploration goals. Sixteen teams competed in the event held last month at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Mass. Teams were required to demonstrate autonomous robots …
National Flight Academy makes learning an adventure
Who says learning can’t be fun? Certainly not the leadership team at Ambition who delivers “inspired play” in six-day immersive programs at the National Flight Academy located in Pensacola, Florida. It all starts with the story – a heart-pumping, adrenaline-filled mission with squadrons competing to successfully finish a task. Whether it is a race or …
Deep Space Network: Finding the signal for 50 years
Robotic missions exploring our solar system have wowed the world with their discoveries and especially the images they return. But even the most sophisticated spacecraft is useless until the science and engineering it gathers makes it back to Earth. NASA’s one of a kind collection of massive dishes around the world makes that possible. The …
Eight essential facts about NASA’s Deep Space Network
1) As the World Turns: The DSN is Earth’s only global spacecraft communication network The Deep Space Network has three facilities – at Goldstone, Calif.; near Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia, all with multiple parabolic dish antennas, including one dish each that is 230 feet (70 meters) across. Located about 120 degrees apart around Earth, the …
A look at ‘The Last Man on the Moon’
The Time: 19.30 GMT Wednesday, June 4th 2014. The Place: London’s Science Museum. Silence and darkness is broken by the Houston skyline. At a livestock auction a white haired cowboy appraises the cattle stock before settling into a stadium seat at a Houston Rodeo Show. One by one the rodeo riders enter the stadium, holding …
Blazing a trail: SpaceShipOne and the Ansari X Prize
What kind of man would live where there is no daring? I don’t believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all. – Charles Lindbergh October 4th 2014 marks the 57th anniversary of Sputnik 1’s launch, the beginning of the Space Age. But ten years before that date …
Epic tale of ‘Man vs. the Universe’ airing on the Science Channel
Mankind has long been at the mercy of the cosmos – subject to the often violent happenings of the boundless universe that exists beyond the confines of Earth’s atmosphere. But today humans are taking huge steps to claim space for their own design, evolution and survival in what is becoming a new race for space. …
Learning celestial navigation at Morehead Planetarium
You might not think a visit to a planetarium could save your life, but that’s how at least seven astronauts see the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, N.C. Nearly every astronaut in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab programs made multiple visits to Morehead to learn celestial navigation. Each spent at least …
Zooniverse enables anyone to participate in science
The advent of faster, digital data capture and processing has been a boon in astronomy but created a problem of too much data to analyse with too few professional astronomers. In July 2007 University of Oxford based astronomer and BBC Sky at Night presenter Chris Lintott and a team of astronomers from the University of …
‘Smoke and fire’ rise over Utah Salt Flats as student rockets soar
The 2013-14 NASA Student Launch rocketry challenge has come to an end – and brought something new to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Tooele County, Utah, where car and motorcycle enthusiasts regularly watch cutting-edge vehicles put to the test, speeding across the vast, flat expanse. On May 17, all eyes there turned upward as 16 …