Space, the final frontier !
04 Jul 2010 Leave a Comment
in The Universe Tags: NASA, Space
Happy Independence Day to our United States of America!
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave, our Land of Opportunity!
I visited Kennedy Space Center yesterday, the second time in two months… Happy to see our United States of America working together with other countries around our globe in unity to build the International Space Station.
We salute our American leaders , as our President Kennedy said “The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.”
The Statue of Liberty’s torch is now passed to our President Obama and is glowing brightly with his speech to our National Aeronautics and Space Administration “Now, little more than 40 years ago, astronauts descended the nine-rung ladder of the lunar module called Eagle, and allowed their feet to touch the dusty surface of the Earth’s only Moon. This was the culmination of a daring and perilous gambit — of an endeavor that pushed the boundaries of our knowledge, of our technological prowess, of our very capacity as human beings to solve problems. It wasn’t just the greatest achievement in NASA’s history — it was one of the greatest achievements in human history. And the question for us now is whether that was the beginning of something or the end of something. I choose to believe it was only the beginning.”
Our United States of America … Land of Leadership … Land of Imagination… Land of Inspiration!
Naveda Abdool – Culturepology Inc.
IMAX-Hubble
29 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in The Universe
Experience the gripping story – full of hope, crushing disappointment, dazzling ingenuity, bravery, and triumph – in Hubble 3D, the seventh awe-inspiring film from the award-winning IMAX® Space Team.
Through the power of IMAX® 3D, Hubble 3D will enable movie-goers to journey through distant galaxies to explore the grandeur and mysteries of our celestial surroundings, and accompany space-walking astronauts as they attempt the most difficult and important tasks in NASA’s history.
The film will offer an inspiring and unique look into the Hubble Space Telescope’s legacy and highlight its profound impact on the way we view the universe and ourselves.
For more information, visit the Hubble 3D website: http://www.imax.com/hubble/
Axel Mellinger’s Milky Way
01 Nov 2009 1 Comment
in The Universe Tags: Space, Star, Telescope, Universe
A new panoramic image of the full night sky — with the Milky Way as its centerpiece — has been made by piecing together 3,000 individual photographs.
The panorama’s creator, Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University, spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan.
”This panorama image shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae,” Mellinger said.
To combine these images, a simple cutting and pasting job would not suffice. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model — and hundreds of hours in front of a computer.
The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.
Hermes
02 Oct 2009 Leave a Comment
in The Universe Tags: NASA, Space
‘Shuttle for Everyone’ Prototype on Display at Intel Developer Forum
Like many Americans coming of age during the time of the Apollo missions, Morris Jarvis dreamed of someday blasting off into space. As a child he sat glued to the television set as man walked on the moon, and he later studied aerospace engineering in college. Over the years Jarvis built countless models of spaceships, exhaustively studied the space shuttle program and even interviewed real astronauts and NASA engineers. But even his friends and co-workers were a little surprised when in 1993 he stopped dreaming and started building a space shuttle in his garage in suburban Phoenix.
Jarvis founded Star Systems Inc. and began working evenings, weekends and vacations, even recruiting some of his engineering colleagues in his quest. The result is a prototype of his Hermes Spacecraft, which is on public display for the first time at the Intel Developer Forum.
Morris and his team are building Hermes out of their own pockets and figure they need about $1.5 million to finish the test work and begin regular space flights. The team is undertaking a grassroots fundraising effort to secure the remaining dollars as well as recruiting other “dreamers” for their mission.
“There isn’t a geek out there who hasn’t dreamed of being an astronaut,” says Jarvis. “We’re all dreamers.”
Hermes, named for the mythological Greek God of boundaries and the travelers who cross them, is a technological marvel loaded with some of Intel’s most advanced embedded chips including the Intel(R) EP80579 Integrated Processor SOC product line and the Intel(R) Atom(TM) processor Z5xx series. Intel technology powers most of the spacecraft’s data gathering, test and communications systems. Other companies assisting the Hermes team include ADI Engineering, Dot Hill, GE Fanuc, MicroSun, and National Instruments.
“Hermes is built on the premise that anyone who wants to should be able to take a trip into space,” says Jarvis. “We hope to provide trips for about the price of a new car.”
About The Hermes Spacecraft
The Hermes Spacecraft is a commercial venture designed to provide affordable space travel to enthusiasts and adventure travelers. The company was founded by engineer and space “dreamer” Morris Jarvis in his garage in Phoenix, Arizona. The Hermes prototype is scheduled for its first test flight in the fall of 2008. For more information visit http://www.hermesspace.com.
Galileo
25 Aug 2009 Leave a Comment
in The Universe Tags: Galileo, Space, Telescope
August 25, 2009–Galileo Galilei peers at the cosmos through a telescope circa 1620, as seen in an undated drawing.
Just over 400 years ago, Galileo–then chair of mathematics at Italy’s University of Padua–got word that Dutch glass makers had invented a device that allowed viewers to see very distant objects as if they were nearby.
The mathematician soon acquired a Dutch instrument, and on August 25, 1609, he presented an improved, more powerful telescope of his own design to the senate of the city-state of Venice. The government officials were so impressed with Galileo’s telescope that they rewarded the professor with a higher salary and tenure for life at his university.
At the time, Galileo was touting the telescope for commercial and military applications, such as watching ships at sea. But in the fall of 1609 Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens, setting into motion a new kind of science: telescopic astronomy.
Star
20 Aug 2009 Leave a Comment
in The Universe Tags: NASA, Star, Universe
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| A globular cluster is a tightly grouped swarm of stars held together by gravity. This globular cluster is one of the densest of the 147 known clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. Image credit: NASA |
A star is a huge, shining ball in space that produces a tremendous amount of light and other forms of energy. The sun is a star, and it supplies Earth with light and heat energy. The stars look like twinkling points of light — except for the sun. The sun looks like a ball because it is much closer to Earth than any other star.
The sun and most other stars are made of gas and a hot, gaslike substance known as plasma. But some stars, called white dwarfs and neutron stars, consist of tightly packed atoms or subatomic particles. These stars are therefore much more dense than anything on Earth.
Stars are grouped in huge structures called galaxies. Telescopes have revealed galaxies throughout the universe at distances of 12 billion to 16 billion light-years. The sun is in a galaxy called the Milky Way that contains more than 100 billion stars. There are more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and the average number of stars per galaxy may be 100 billion. Thus, more than 10 billion trillion stars may exist. But if you look at the night sky far from city lights, you can see only about 3,000 of them without using binoculars or a telescope.
