Archive for the 'Space' Category
The One About Satellites Beaming Power Down to Earth Is Making the Rounds Again
March 17th, 2014*roll eyes* Via: Wired: For decades, the Pentagon has been the world’s largest oil consumer, and as global petroleum prices continue to rise, the military has been searching for feasible energy alternatives. Now they’re looking in space. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is building technology that will allow the military to capture solar power […]
DARPA’s Experimental Spaceplane XS-1
February 12th, 2014Via: space.com: The United States military is making progress toward developing a new unmanned space plane, which it aims to begin flight-testing in 2017. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to award the first design contracts for the vehicle project — known as Experimental Spaceplane, or XS-1— in May or thereabouts, officials said. […]
The Mysterious Web That Connects All Galaxies In The Universe
January 22nd, 2014Via: Business Insider: For the first time, astronomers were able to see a string of hot gas known as a filament that is thought to be part of the mysterious underlying structure that dictates the layout of all the stars and galaxies in our universe. Scientists believe that matter in the universe is arranged into […]
France-UAE Satellite Deal Shaky After U.S. Spy Tech Discovered Onboard
January 8th, 2014Via: Space War: The sale of two intelligence satellites to the UAE by France for nearly a billion dollars could go south after they were found to contain American technology designed to intercept data transmitted to the ground station. The equipment, costing 3.4 billion dirhams ($930 million), constitutes two high-resolution Pleiades-type Falcon Eye military intelligence […]
China Landed Rover on Moon
December 14th, 2013Update: Chinese Rover Landed on Moon and Launched Successfully Via: CNN: China’s first lunar rover deployed successfully from the unmanned spacecraft Chang’e-3 that landed on the moon Saturday. Jade Rabbit (called Yutu in Chinese) is a six-wheeled lunar rover equipped with at least four cameras and two mechanical legs that can dig up soil samples […]
NASA Unveils ‘Valkyrie’ Robot for DARPA Competition
December 13th, 2013Via: IEEE Spectrum: Valkyrie (officially designated “R5” by NASA) is a 1.9 meter tall, 125 kilogram, 44 degree of freedom, battery-powered humanoid robot. A team from NASA’s JSC in Houston, in partnership with the University of Texas and Texas A&M and with funding from the state of Texas itself, built the robot for the DRC, […]
Darpa’s Giant Folding Spy Satellite Will Dwarf All Other Space Telescopes
December 10th, 2013Via: Wired: Spying could become much easier if a new lightweight, folding satellite concept gets off the ground. Darpa, the military’s futuristic research agency, says it has plans to “break the glass ceiling” of space telescopes by shooting a new design into orbit that’s made of plastic and unfolds into a mammoth satellite that would […]
Moon Express Unveils Commercial Lunar Lander Design
December 6th, 2013Via: NBC: A commercial space company has revealed the design of the lunar lander that it aims to send to the moon in 2015. California-based Moon Express unveiled the blueprint and first images of its MX-1 lunar lander on Thursday in Las Vegas, during the last day of the Autodesk University computer-aided design conference. In […]
Manned Fly-By Mission to Mars in 2017?
November 20th, 2013Via: Washington Post: Billionaire Dennis Tito, tired of being told that we can’t send humans to Mars just yet, on Wednesday revealed his scheme for launching two astronauts to the red planet as early as December 2017. Dubbed “Inspiration Mars,” the fly-by mission would exploit a rare alignment of Earth and Mars that minimizes the […]
Stuxnet Infected Russian Nuclear Plant, International Space Station
November 11th, 2013Via: SC Magazine: Stuxnet had ‘badly infected’ the internal network of a Russian nuclear plant after the sophisticated malware caused chaos in Iran’s uranium facilities in Natanz. The malware, widely considered to have been developed by the US Government as a means to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment plans, had crossed a physically separated ‘air-gapped’ network […]
