Really Rocket Science

Great job by NOAA in putting this video together, marking the retirement of the GOES-12 spacecraft.

NOAA’s GOES-12 satellite was decommissioned on August 16th, 2013 after 3,788 days in service. From April 2003 — May 2010, GOES-12 served as GOES East, providing “eye in the sky” monitoring for such memorable events as the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season and the series of blizzards during the winter of 2009-2010. After suffering thruster control issues, GOES-12 was taken out of normal service and moved to provide greater coverage of the Southern Hemisphere as the first-ever GOES South. During that time it provided enhanced severe weather monitoring for South America.

This animation shows one image from each day of the satellite’s life — a total of 3,641 full disk visible images.

Pretty amazing indeed: capturing a Perseid meteor exploding. It’s legit, too. Via Universe Today…

Personally, I’ve never seen anything like this, and photographer and digital artist Michael K. Chung said he couldn’t believe what he saw when he was processing images he took for a timelapse of the Perseid meteor shower. It appears he captured a meteor explosion and the resulting expansion of a shock wave or debris ring.

“It was taken early in the morning on August 12, 2013 from my backyard in Victorville, CA,” Michael told Universe Today via email. “The fade to white is NOT an edit- it is overexposure due to the sun coming up. From what I can tell, the timelapse sequence of the explosion and expanding debris span an actual time of approximately 20 minutes.”

Michael said because he shoots at much higher resolution than 720p, he’s able to provide two different sequences in this video: one is with the full frame of each capture scaled/reduced and then cropped down to 1280×720, and the other is with the full frame kept at resolution with just the region around the explosion cropped to 1280×720. “I included each sequence twice – once at 24 frames per second and the other at around 12 fps.”

Not nearly as dramatic as a seemingly-exploding Large Megellanic Cloud Galaxy, but it’ll do.

Cameron Smith is making his own spacesuit. Although this is not for everybody, we think it’s very cool just the same. Wired did a piece on this a year ago…

Taking a balloon up into the lower stratosphere may seem crazy, but to Cameron M. Smith it’s an opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream. The 45-year-old Portland State University anthropologist couldn’t join NASA’s aviation program because of his poor eyesight. Lacking the funds to buy a ticket on a private space flight, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

At 50,000 feet up, death is imminent, so the first thing to do was build a suit. Smith bought some of the parts off the Internet: a diver’s dry suit, a gauge that measures internal air pressure, and an aquarium pump to circulate cooling fluid. Ace Hardware had other bits like nylon straps, wire, and a slew of PVC fittings and valves. It’s topped off with an authentic 1980s-era soviet fighter helmet.

Once the proof-of-concept suit is complete, Smith will test his rig in a hypobaric chamber, and if all goes well it will be rebuilt with sturdier elements. Then he’ll craft a nylon balloon, get a balloon pilot’s license, and clear his route with authorities. “If they could do this in the 1930s with rubberized canvas and pigskin gloves, surely I can do it now with the technology available,” Smith says. “This is not so crazy. This is not so wild.” Sure. We’ll just stay on the ground and watch from here, thanks.

So what does he plan to do with this? Make one for Copenhagen Suborbitals, which describes itself as…

This is a non-profit suborbital space endeavour founded and led by Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, based entirely on sponsors, private donators and part time specialists. Since May 2008 we have been working full time to reach our goal of launching ourselves into space and to show the world that human space flight is possible without major government budgets and administration.

Kristian von Bengtson blogged it recently…

In just a few days DIY space suit guys Cameron Smith and John Haslett will visit us in Copenhagen for a 10-day session of suit presentation, seating design and space suit testing.

We are all very excited and I am trying to get prepared for this special event. Even though we joined forces half a year ago – meeting in person like this is going to be very special and will mark a special celebration of a US/Danish joint venture space adventure!

This is one of the most interesting DIY projects we’ve ever seen.

The HI-SEAS experiment is an interesting proposition. Lock six people into a dome for four months and have them work with non-perishable food. On the north slope of Mauna Loa.

Hawaii? Why not the South Pole? Well, that has its cohabitation challenges. It only looks like Mars — without the minus-60-degree Celsius temps.

They had interesting things to do, for example. With power and Internet, why not tune in and munch out?

I could probably survive with these ingredients, which include Spam. The most important one was actually a treat: Nutella. Which, by the way, is looking into different colors. They should sell a limited edition “Mars Red Nutella” for the geek market.

Oy, there’s a charging station, mate!

Who else but the Scots and ClydeSpace would send something like this into space? Via Wired UK…

UKube-1 is the UK Space Agency’s first CubeSat mission and is being fully assembled by Scottish satellite company ClydeSpace. It now has the added honour of being the world’s ” first functioning pop-art satellite”, with designs by artists Jon Gibson and Amanda White, who run the famous iambit gallery in Los Angeles.

The celestial charging station will hopefully be seen as a gesture of goodwill to would-be space invaders, joke the pair.

“It’s like when a complete stranger at the airport lets you use their wall charger,” says Gibson in an email to Wired.co.uk. “If their original goal was to obliterate our species with a massive plasma canon, perhaps even such a small gesture of kindness will make them reconsider.”

Credit: iam8bit

It’s high time get more creative with their public-facing marketing — as well as to their B2B audiences.

They probably grew up on Monty Python — always good for creative inspiration.

You don’t need to understand Russian to figure out what’s going on here.

It’s an old washing machine drum, a steel pipe, angle iron and some bolts, plus concrete. Mash them up and you’ve got a great BBQ contraption. Probably works as well as a Weber kettle, but much cheaper. Looks like good airflow, too.

Next trip to the county solid waste disposal station will find me looking for an old washing machine. Excellent recycling idea!

Ain’t nobody got time for watching Mars Curiosity rover videos!

Here’s the first year, in two minutes.

There’s a new LHC app out from Oxford University “with flashy graphics, more games, and even more ways to see collisions from CERN.

Japan will be first with sending talking robot into space, named Kirobo.

Check out the promo video, in Japanese, which is very well done. Probably because Dentsu is in on it. Nice site, too.

We blogged about the Slingatron years ago, so it’s nice to see it’s back. This time, via Kickstarter…

We firmly believe this may be the most important Kickstarter project you will ever have the opportunity to back and to be involved with. The Slingatron is a mechanical hypervelocity mass accelerator that has the potential to dramatically increase flight opportunities and reduce the cost of launching payloads into earth orbit, thus helping to make humanity a truly spacefaring species. The Slingatron technology can be incrementally grown in performance and size to ultimately launch payloads into orbit. Our Kickstarter project goal is to build and demonstrate a modular Slingatron 5 times larger in diameter than the previous existing Mark 2 prototype. It will be used to launch in our laboratory a 1/4 pound payload to 1 kilometer/sec. That is about 2,237 mph! If launched straight up at that speed, a payload would reach an altitude of about 51 km, neglecting air resistance. This Kickstarter project is an important next step in the development of the Slingatron because it will provide vital technical information, practical experience, and cost data on what will be required to build a full-scale Slingatron orbital launch system in the future.

Let’s hope this time they have the foresight to make sure their domain name doesn’t expire.

Check out the test…