NASA
NASA’s Next Plan For A Space Station Could Involve Pulling An Asteroid Into Lunar Orbit
$2.6 billion can buy you a lot of things. 2.6 billion lottery tickets. 2,600 copies of Action Comics #1, if there were that many. Hell, you could probably get the President to go on record saying he’s a cyborg for that kind of money. And apparently, you can afford to pluck an asteroid from outer …
Leonard Nimoy Is Our Guide In This Short Film About NASA’s Dawn Asteroid Mission
We here at GFR are automatically predisposed to be fascinated by any new foray into space exploration…that’s kind of our thing. And while the Curiosity Mars mission may have gotten all the headlines last year, one equally fascinating journey has been underway since 2007. NASA’s Dawn mission seeks to explore two of the largest asteroids …
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NASA Astronaut Takes You On A Guided Tour Of The ISS
I want to go to there.
Deep Space Travel May Hasten Alzheimer’s Disease
With as much as there is to do on this planet, one might think it would be enough to satisfy every whim and fancy. But there’s an entire universe out there that has barely been explored, and however many generations it takes, humans are going to make those kinds of trips. But hopefully with an …
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Listen To What The International Space Station Sounds Like
Sometimes when I make a point to notice how quiet it is around me, I’ll find that it isn’t quiet at all. Bugs are the usual culprits, banding together for a thousands-strong symphony that I suspect would become increasingly maddening if that’s all I ever heard. It’s a good thing I’m not an astronaut, for …
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NASA’s New Mars Rovers Look Like Medieval Weapons
NASA goes medieval! Over the past few years, NASA has made their rovers to look friendly and acceptable to human eyes. For example, the Mars Rover Curiosity almost looks like Pixar’s Wall-E. But NASA’s new design for an upcoming rover has a more medieval look, as it resembles a spiked battle mace. Engineers and scientists …
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Walt Disney Among Nine Artists Immortalized In Craters Named for Them
For the past ninety years, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has been naming all of the celestial bodies found in our universe. The alphanumeric proper names all look like suitable passwords for important email accounts, but more common names do catch on for some. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be a star, asteroid or …
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NASA’s New Spacesuit Prototype Will Take You To Infinity And Beyond
There’s been an ongoing back-and-forth conversation between real-life science and science fiction for decades. Star Trek gave us communicators, and we eventually got flip-open cell phones that looked an awful lot like them. During the run of Babylon 5, creator J. Michael Straczynski fielded inquiries from NASA scientists interested in someday using the design of …
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NASA Releases Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday Video
It was a good run while it lasted. According to some conspiracy theorists, the world will come to an end on December 21st 2012 at the end of the Mayan calendar. But the U.S. Government and NASA want to assure people that we will all still be here on December 22nd. To convince naysayers, NASA …
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Mysterious Gullies On Asteroid Vesta May Have Been Formed By Fluids
When I was a kid, a gully was something behind someone’s house that filled up with water when it rained, and even though it seemed too gross to just walk in and swim in it, it was perfectly fine to swing into it from a rope haphazardly tied to a tree branch. There’s no app …
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Gorgeous New HD Earth at Night Images Brighten Up Your Life
The phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” is sometimes applicable, while other times, a broad overstatement. A sailboat in front of a lighthouse? There’s a novel place to look for inspiration. But pictures from the American Geophysical Union conference demand far, far more. Not that you’re going to get that here. NASA’s NPOESS …
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NASA Stalwart Rover Opportunity Has Completed Matijevic Hill Observations
I can’t tell you how many things I’ve owned that didn’t last nine years without malfunctioning in at least one way. Yet the Opportunity rover is still going as strong as it ever was, proving to be one of the most cost-effective tools ever built, lasting 36 times longer than the original three-month mission. NASA …
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James Cameron, Mars, And Climate Change Form The Bulk Of AGU’s 2012 Conference
Pop culture fanatics have Comic-Con and SXSW. Geo-scientists have the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The conference, which runs from Dec. 3-7, is being held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, and is bound to be a reference point for numerous news stories in the days to follow. Do you have Curiosity about …
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NASA’s MESSENGER Probe Discovers Ice On Mercury’s Poles
For most of us amateur science followers, Mercury is probably the very last place we would think to look for water or ice. The closest planet to our sun orbits at distances between 28.5 million miles and 43.5 million miles, and the side of the planet facing the sun at any time can get up …
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NASA Teases Major Mars Announcement
One of the main mission goals of NASA’s Curiosity rover is to search for evidence of life on Mars — both any signs of it currently, or further insight as to whether it might have existed in the past. Sure, the former is a definitely long-shot, but you never know, right? I’m fairly certain Curiosity …
NASA May Soon Announce More Manned Missions To The Moon
To the moon, Alice!
Re-Enter The Dragon: SpaceX’s Craft Returns From ISS Supply Run
When you have more money than some small governments, you can make amazing things happen. Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, has given the space program that independent kick in the ass it needed to make it more exciting to the masses again, since contest-based reality television costs less to keep people interested. Speaking of things we …
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Space Shuttle Endeavor’s Beautiful Time-Lapsed Final Voyage
And you think traffic is bad where you live. Consider having to drive behind the retired Space Shuttle Endeavor as it dashed through Los Angeles streets at the dizzying pace of a turtle with two broken legs. And that’s when it was actually moving. But for something as historic as this, the complaints were relatively …
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Stunning Retro Drawings Of The Space Shuttles
The Space Shuttle Endeavour completed its final journey last week, one that didn’t include breaking the bonds of Earth’s gravity and soaring through outer space. Not even a little. Piggybacking on a jumbo jet, the vessel landed in Los Angeles, where it will find a new home at the California Science Center. Many view this …
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NASA Unveils New Plan To Send Astronauts Beyond The Moon, But Will The White House Bite?
When NASA lays out a plan for human spaceflight, it usually revolves around a presidential mandate that outlines the course of the agency within a president’s time in office. It’s not really the best arrangement, but if the president happens to stick around for two terms, then it hopefully provides a nice, eight-year cushion to …
Curiosity Captures A Martian Solar Eclipse
In the latest “Holy crap, look at this awesome picture Curiosity took” news, the rover has managed to capture a solar eclipse on Mars. It’s not quite as impressive as one of ours, but it’s still a pretty awesome for being what it is, a picture of an eclipse on an alien world.
Mars Rover Finds Mysterious Spheres, Confounds Scientists
With all the press surrounding Curiosity, you may have forgotten that we already have a working rover on the surface of Mars. Even though its sister rover Spirit has long since been consigned to its Martian grave, Opportunity is still roving around the red planet and returning valuable science data. Apparently unphased by the new …
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NASA’s Space Launch System: One Year Later
One year ago today, hot on the heels of retiring the space shuttle program, NASA announced its next step in spaceflight that would supposedly take us beyond low earth orbit, the Space Launch System. While the public’s reaction to the announcement of the SLS has been tepid due to its uninspiring design and extremely un-ambitious …
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Be The First To See Unreleased Pics Of Vesta While You Help NASA Map Its Surface
Even though NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has already departed Vesta and is on its way to its next target, there is still a lot of science to be done with the pictures it took during its year-long survey of the asteroid. NASA is now seeking the help of citizen scientists to map the craters on Vesta’s …
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Today Is The 50th Anniversary Of JFK’s Moon Speech
Fifty years ago today, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood behind a podium at Rice University and dared us to put human footprints on the moon. The speech has become one of the most iconic moments of JFK’s presidency, a clarion call for us to dream big and pursue that goal because. Kennedy’s speech is famous …
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An Astronaut Writes From The International Space Station After September 11, 2001
The events of September 11, 2001 are still being felt, these 11 years later. Even for those of us who weren’t directly affected by the deaths of friends or families, there can be no question that the attacks shook our country in a way that hadn’t been felt since the Pearl Harbor attack that launched …
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Funny NASA Mission Posters
I imagine being an astronaut is a high-stress occupation. Despite being quite literally a dream job for many at NASA, there’s no question that every launch requires a thousand things to go right, and anything that goes wrong can mean serious trouble. With that kind of pressure, you almost have to have a sense of …
Curiosity’s Tracks As Viewed From Space
One of the coolest aspects about the Curiosity rover’s mission to Mars has to be its close cooperation with one of NASA’s other Mars projects, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. MRO was re-purposed for Curiosity’s landing in order to give a stunning shot of the rover parachuting down to Gale crater, and now it’s giving us even more …
NASA Gives $100,000 To Develop Radical Supersonic Jet Design
You’ve got to appreciate NASA’s willingness to try something new when it comes to aerospace design. Sure, they might have given up on the whole space plane idea altogether but when it comes to regular atmospheric aircraft they’re willing to throw money down on just about anything. As cutting edge as NASA likes to be, …
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The Planetary Society Gives Students The Chance To Name An Asteroid
The Planetary Society is pretty excited about NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid 1999 RQ36, but they do have some issues with the asteroid itself. It seems they aren’t that happy with the name, so they’ve decided to do something about it with a science outreach contest. They are teaming up with MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and the University of Arizona …
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