Really Rocket Science

Not exactly a genius project, but it’s another good use of an old reflector. Use the old dish as a backyard fire pit.

All because he tripped over it in the garage. Via Instructables…

We had a large dinner party / BBQ in our back yard a couple of years ago at the beginning of the summer. As the sun sat the girls at the party started getting cold. All I had on hand was a few #10 cans that we punched holes in, filled with charcoal and lit. Imagine 5-10 girls trying to crowd a small can of coals for heat. So I went in search of a Fire-pit / Brazier for my next party. I couldn’t find one anywhere. I looked for one of the round kettle style charcoal BBQ grills to convert but couldn’t find one of those either. When I returned home discouraged I tripped over an old Satellite dish laying around my garage. It gave me an idea. With no more than $10 spent this is what you get. Cheap and effective and kind of cool. IF you wish you could add a lid or use tighter mesh to reduce sparks and up your cool factor.

Most folks who live in wide open space probably have real fire pits. If you have a smaller backyard or live in the suburbs, you’ll want to use a fire pit like this so you could put a lid on it and crash for the night and not worry about getting a FAIL tag for burning down the neighborhood. Please: never use gasoline to get the fire going.

The African Space Research Program deserves your support! What they write about themselves:

Welcome to the African Space Research Program This is an association located in Uganda with a core representation in Dallas/Ft which handles all international matters outside Africa. Our association has over seventy thousand members; it is a non profit association dedicated towards conducting space science basing on African soils. In this association we can manufacture high flying aircrafts, satellites, and space craft to enable the African Space Research Program (ASRP) one day we will conduct research at the furthest points of our solar system & galaxy to say!

As of now we’re manufacturing two projects, one an aircraft that we will use to scan meteoroids and asteroids closest to earth’s orbit, so will the same aircraft help us collect data to prepare our next project known as the Dynacraft. the second is a Space Craft heading to the skies with a life, a mice on board to test the competence of ASRP deploying a human in orbit

At the same time, in our association we’re training pilots & astronauts, our association is not certified to license pilots, so after our training they will have to go to a certified pilot school, test & acquire a flying license. For our astronauts, we will certify them our selves, since we’re the first association to manufacture space crafts in Africa, within our students we can tell who is ready to thrust beyond the skies!

Objective:
Our main objective is finding life in our solar system, & neighboring solar systems.
This isn’t about money, it is about human-kind life & dignity, this is about Africa joining the struggle of finding Earth-like planets, this is about setting a core base foundation for our future generations to come.
We will deploy projects in our solar neighborhood, projects we don’t expect to return back to Earth in our generation, however our descendants will benefit from such projects because they will return back in their time, and this is the best gift folks we can give our future generations.

May God Bless Africa; May God Bless Uganda

Came across this story in VOA, which I found very interesting…

Lawrence Okello could tell that something unusual was going on. But when he first ventured over to his neighbor’s backyard in Kampala, Uganda, he could hardly believe his eyes.

“I was so shocked. I couldn’t believe that in Uganda, we can have a kind of achievement so impressive,” he said.

Okello’s neighbor, Chris Nsamba, is head of the African Space Research Program, an organization he founded in 2009 after studying astronomy in the United States. But armed with nothing more than a team of student volunteers, and working from his mother’s backyard, the 28-year-old Nsamba has set out to build and launch Uganda’s first space observer.

Chris Nsamba and his team work on their projects in his mother’s backyard. (Photo: African Space Research Program)
Chris Nsamba and his team work on their projects in his mother’s backyard. (Photo: African Space Research Program)
Neighbors like Okello have been eagerly watching the probe take shape.

“There is a small project I saw him making. He called it a space observer,” he said. “I heard him saying it’s going to capture a picture of Uganda from space. He showed me that it’s going to work. I saw it responding to the GPS. They are just preparing to launch it, but I know it will fly. It will fly.”

About the size and shape of a beach ball, the probe is equipped with solar panels and a camera. On its maiden voyage, Nsamba plans to send it up with a passenger as well – a live rat.

“The reason why we called it observer is because it has a camera on it, so it can take pictures and videos, and it can send live data back to our control center. So it can observe space,” he said. “Two, we are using it to check out our skills of keeping something alive in space.”

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The commemoration of the Battle of Hastings is something I am not entirely familiar with, although I’m certain of one detail: an Imperial Stormtrooper seems out of place here — the same goes for the Iron Patriot.

According to METRO, all are welcome…

Attendees at an English Heritage re-enactment event celebrating several famous battles from the past were left scratching their heads after a Stormtropper turned up looking to take part.

More than 2,000 people showed up to the History Live event in Northamptonshire.

They were dressed in costumes worn throughout English military history, including the Battle of Hastings, Wars of the Roses and the D-Day landings.

But for some reason at least one of the participants thought it would be a good idea to wear a Star Wars costume, apparently deciding the event needed a little science fiction to spice things up.

The Stormtropper could be seen mixing with the crowd and acting like nothing was out of place.

We can only imagine the Star Wars fan had made a mistake and thought films were included in the event, otherwise we dread to think what type of history he was taught at school.

Satcom-equipped drone landed on the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush…

The U.S. Navy’s X-47B drone on Wednesday completed its first-ever landing aboard an aircraft carrier in what officials heralded as the future of naval aviation.

The bat winged-shaped jet built by Northrop Grumman Corp. made a smooth approach, touched down on the flight deck and came to a sudden halt after catching an arresting cable aboard the USS George H.W. Bush at about 1:40 p.m. The ship — the Navy’s newest nuclear-powered carrier — was sailing about 70 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, Va., in the Atlantic Ocean.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus drew comparisons of the event to pilot Eugene Ely’s first-ever landing of a biplane on a ship in 1911.

“It is not often that you get a chance to see the future, but that’s what we got to do today,” he said during a news conference with reporters afterward. “This is an amazing day for aviation in general and for naval aviation in particular.”

The service’s top officer, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, called it a “miraculous technological feat.”

Crackerjack job, mates!

A team of scientist have found radio burst from billions of light years away — beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Billions.

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation had this to say:

CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia has detected mysterious ‘flashes’ of radio energy from the distant Universe that may open up a whole new area of astrophysics. The surprising finding, made by a team of scientists from ten institutions in Australia, the USA, UK, Germany and Italy, is published in today’s issue of the journal Science.

“Staggeringly, we estimate there could be one of these flashes going off every ten seconds somewhere in the sky,” said research team member Dr Simon Johnston, Head of Astrophysics at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.

Four flashes were detected, each from a different direction and each lasting for only a millisecond (a thousandth of a second).

The characteristics of the radio signal — how it is ‘smeared out’ in frequency from travelling through space — indicate that the flashes came from up to 11 billion light-years away.

The Parkes Observatory’s 64-meter radio telescope did the job.

Interested? Here’s the abstract from Science:

Searches for transient astrophysical sources often reveal unexpected classes of objects that are useful physical laboratories. In a recent survey for pulsars and fast transients, we have uncovered four millisecond-duration radio transients all more than 40° from the Galactic plane. The bursts’ properties indicate that they are of celestial rather than terrestrial origin. Host galaxy and intergalactic medium models suggest that they have cosmological redshifts of 0.5 to 1 and distances of up to 3 gigaparsecs. No temporally coincident x- or gamma-ray signature was identified in association with the bursts. Characterization of the source population and identification of host galaxies offers an opportunity to determine the baryonic content of the universe.

Far out, man.

I think this is a great way to get more girls interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics!

Help us Kick it.

Footage from the live broadcast of the Proton-M launch failure…

And from further away…

So this is why spectators must watch from 2 miles away. Awesome shockwave.

Cool APOD today:

What would it look like to orbit a black hole? Since the strong gravity of the black hole can significantly alter light paths, conditions would indeed look strange. For one thing, the entire sky would be visible, since even stars behind the black hole would have their light bent to the observer’s eye. For another, the sky near the black hole would appear significantly distorted, with more and more images of the entire sky visible increasingly near the black hole. Most visually striking, perhaps, is the outermost sky image completely contained inside an easily discernible circle known as the Einstein ring. Orbiting a black hole, as shown in the above scientifically-accurate computer-created illustrative video, will show stars that pass nearly directly behind the black hole as zipping around rapidly near the Einstein ring. Although star images near the Einstein ring may appear to move faster than light, no star is actually moving that quickly. The above video is part of a sequence of videos visually exploring the space near a black hole’s event horizon.

Very interesting piece by Liz Fuller-Wright in the CSM last week on the discovery of variably-pulsating stars. Intially referred to as LGM-1 by the astronomers at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, including graduate student Jocelyn Bell. The “LGM” stood for “little green men.”

For seven years, the research team observed more than 3,000 young stars in the star cluster NGC 3766 for a few weeks each year. They found variable stars – 163 of them – including 36 that seem to break all the rules of pulsars. In fact, they held off on labeling the stars “pulsars,” choosing the less controversial label of “periodic variable stars,” though they said that they expect the scientific community to confirm that they are, in fact, pulsars.

As with many astronomic discoveries, it takes quite a while to confirm “discoveries.” This one in particular may rewrite the book on pulsar formation.

That’s pretty awesome. Maybe we’ll see pulsars in BigBangPrints soon.

Awesome job by Little Blue Lemon Photography of Toronto.

There was a shot floating around the internet last week of a bridal party being chased by a dinosaur. It’s funny, admittedly. So here’ s our take on the idea…mostly because Leslie (and us) are huge Star Wars nerds! We couldn’t resist their bridal party getting chased by a squad of Imperial AT-AT Walkers! lol. So for all you Star Wars fans, this ones for you.

For you Photoshop-loving rocket scientists who are getting married soon, start thinking! Via Mashable.