Click here to view the embedded video.

From NASA:

Moonbase Alpha is a game with single and multiplayer options where players step into the role of an exploration team member in a futuristic 3-D lunar settlement. Their mission is to restore critical systems and oxygen flow after a nearby meteor strike cripples a solar array and life support equipment.

NASA will release the game on Valve’s Steam network on Tuesday, July 6. The Army Game Studio produced the game with development by Virtual Heroes, a division of Applied Research Associates in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

Game Features:

* Realistic NASA exploration scenarios
* Immersive 3D graphics
* Solo or team play
* VOIP chat
* Alternate voicable text chat

…COMING JULY 6th!

I have a Beta copy of this and find it rather challenging. The graphics are good and the play on the laptop is nice and smooth. At first I thought driving the rover was a little counter intuitive until I started piloting the robots, all of a sudden the rovers weren’t so bad

I’m getting there even though I seem to be running out of oxygen on every EVA.

Enjoy a safe 4^th of July everybody!!

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Rob at 12:29 CDT

Ah, I see you out there.  You’re quietly looking over the riddle to see if you know the answer, then leaving without a word.  You really should give it a guess, you know.  I promise nobody will laugh hysterically, point fingers, or ridicule your comment.

Tom and I are winding down this cycle, getting ready for another bonus riddle round.  Get your name on the list so you too can experience the aggravation and frustration of trying to solve a really tough riddle in three guesses, with no feedback, not seeing the other guesses, not knowing if you’re right or wrong — warm or cold — until the next day.  YAY!

Okay, right on to today’s brain-buster.  Well, maybe not “brain-buster”.  How about “brain-exerciser”?  Ready?  Today you will be looking for an object:

We think of this object as one thing, but it’s really two.

This object does something important.

While not the largest of its kind, this certainly makes the top 15.

It’s recently been involved in some very interesting discoveries.

It gets around a common problem of its “kind” by, in essence, wearing glasses.

Its two parts are not close together, but have this whole North/South thing going on.

If you follow the blog, you have a running start at guessing this one.

Nobody has to be near this to make it work.

We see it, but it never looks at us.

How about that?  Clear as mud.  Get those guesses in… you know I’m in the comments waiting for someone to talk to me.

Progress resupply ship (NOT the errant one). Credit: NASA

The automated resupply ship, Progress 38, has lost telemetry and has flown past the International Space Station. Reports are sketchy, some reports have the Progress spinning out of control. I don’t know about that and I’ll stick to what NASA is saying as of 15:14 ET:

Friday’s docking for the ISS Progress 38 has been aborted due to a loss of telemetry. Flight controllers have reported the resupply craft flew past the International Space Station. The flight control team is in the early stages of diagnosing what may have caused the aborted docking with the space station, but have decided not to re-attempt docking Friday. As the Progress 38 continues its separation from the space station, the Russian and American teams are discussing their options for a future docking attempt and reconfiguring the station for standard operations. The six Expedition 24 crew members are continuing with normal station activities.

I’m watching NASA TV and they are apparently replaying coverage from before the problem started. I did hear the Progress lost telemetry a bit less than a half before the schedule 11:58 am ET docking and flew past the station at a safe distance. The main thing is nobody is (or was) in any danger.

If by chance NASA TV has anything new in the next hour or two, I will let you know.

A Gemini image of a star and its 8-Jupiter mass planet taken in 2008. Click for a larger version. Credit: Gemini Observatory.

I wrote about this back in 2008 and finally we have confirmation this is indeed the first directly imaged planet around another star!

Here’s the first part of the press release from the Gemini Observatory:

A planet only about eight times the mass of Jupiter has been confirmed orbiting a Sun-like star at over 300 times farther from the star than the Earth is from our Sun. The newly confirmed planet is the least massive planet known to orbit at such a great distance from its host star. The discovery utilized high-resolution adaptive optics technology at the Gemini Observatory to take direct images and spectra of the planet.

First reported in September 2008 by a team led by David Lafrenière (then at the University of Toronto, now at the University of Montreal and Center for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec), the suspected planetary system required further observations over time to confirm that the planet and star were indeed moving through space together. “Back in 2008 what we knew for sure was that there was this young planetary mass object sitting right next to a young Sun-like star on the sky,” says Lafrenière. The extremely close proximity of the two objects strongly suggested that they were associated with each other but it was still possible (but unlikely) that they were unrelated and only aligned by chance in the sky. According to Lafrenière, “Our new observations rule out this chance alignment possibility, and thus confirms that the planet and the star are related to each other.”

Read the rest of this and get more visuals at the Gemini site.