Daily Archives: September 1, 2014

Mario Party 9 Bowser’s Space Station pt 2 – Video

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Mario Party 9 Bowser #39;s Space Station pt 2

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Space Station 13 Episode 32: BLOOD – Video

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Space Station 13 Episode 32: BLOOD
I am a vampire, and I do vampire things.

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International Space Station Footage + Orchestral Bowie – Video

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International Space Station Footage + Orchestral Bowie
In April the International Space Station started live-streaming high definition footage of Earth. I used my iphone to record over 20 hours of said footage, and then set it to a recording of...

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building a space station part 4 continued – Video

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building a space station part 4 continued
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Race to Build NASA Space Taxi Down to the Wire

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A three-way race to build a commercially operated spaceship to shuttle astronauts -- and other paying customers -- to and from low-Earth orbit is close the finish line, with NASA aiming to award development and flight service contracts as early as next week.

So far, two companies favoring capsule designs -- Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX -- have won the lions share of NASAs Commercial Crew program funds. The effort, which began in 2010, is intended to provide a U.S. alternative for flying crews to the International Space Station, which orbits about 260 miles above Earth.

Since NASA retired the space shuttles in 2011, the only human transportation system flying to the station is owned by Russia, which charges about $70 million per person for rides on its Soyuz capsules. NASA hopes to change that before the end of 2017.

NEWS: Space Taxi, Please! NASA Investing $1.1 Bln

Along with Boeing and SpaceX, NASA has been funding space taxi design work at a third company, Colorado-based Sierra Nevada Corp., though its contracts have been about half of what Boeing and SpaceX received.

Sierra Nevada eschewed the capsule design in favor of a small winged spaceplane called Dream Chaser, which resembles a miniature space shuttle. The company has signed partnership agreements with more than 30 companies, nine universities, nine NASA field centers and three international space agencies, a strategy that could provide some flexibility if it is not selected for additional NASA funding.

Weve always looked at this as a system, with the space station being a mission. There are other missions that we are looking at. Having this wide group of companies allows us to look at construction, repair missions, the ability to do short- and long-duration science missions independent of the space station, Mark Sirangelo, Sierra Nevada Space Systems president, told Discovery News.

For us, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars less at the start of the competition put us at a schedule disadvantage -- we couldnt do as many things -- but it made us be a lot more creative in how we were going to manage the last two years, Sirangelo said.

PHOTOS: Dragon's Bounty: SpaceX Mission Complete

Showing that you can manage to a very tight budget is a pretty big thing, he added.

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Algal Growth A Blooming Problem Space Station To Help Monitor

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August 30, 2014

Image Caption: A Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO) image of western Lake Erie, Aug. 15, 2014, taken from the orbital perspective of the International Space Station. Credit: HICO Team/Naval Research Laboratory

Jessica Nimon, International Space Station Program Science Office NASAs Johnson Space Center

The green stuff that clouds up fish tanks its not just an aesthetic annoyance. In fact, if youve been watching recent news of algal bloom concerns in Lake Erie, you know that the right conditions for algae can lead to contamination of local water sources, potentially impacting aquatic life and humans. What you might not have known is that among the resources to help study this problem you will find the International Space Stations Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO).

This instrument, mounted to the exterior of the orbiting laboratory, provides a way for researchers to see 90 wavelengths of light not visible to the human eye. This can help with research on harmful algal blooms (HABs) because they, along with other organic materials, have a spectral signature. The biological matter emits a unique wavelength as it absorbs and scatters solar energy, resulting in fluorescence and backscattering. Essentially the light reflects back to HICO, which reads the data like a fingerprint.

Researchers can use the information from HICO to see what theyre missing with their own senses. With it they study biological and chemical signatures for aquatic and terrestrial materials. This can reveal the presence of microscopic plants, organic compounds, suspended sediments and other factors controlling water quality.

HICO was first designed and built by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) for the Office of Naval Research to assess water quality in the coastal ocean. HICO continues to operate beyond its original one-year mission, having moved past the initial three-year mission when NASA took over the support of operations in January 2013. Researchers continue to use HICO for science around the world.

To address water quality issues, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) partnered with the NRL at NASAs Stennis Space Center (SSC) in Mississippi to enable the study of HABs, including those in Lake Erie.

Historically, blooms have been visually observed by the naked eye due to the discoloration of the water, said Ruhul Amin, Ph.D., principal investigator for the HICO CASIS-NRL project. Now optical sensors can detect these changes in the color of the water and quantitatively measure the spectral radiance changes due to algae blooms.

In the Lake Erie area researchers are looking at phytoplankton and algal blooms that occur regularly in summer months, often in the harmful quantities found this year. Of particular concern are blue-green algae Microcystis spp., which can cause health concerns in humans such as nausea, numbness or dizzinesspotentially leading to liver damage. Once airborne in sea spray, the brevetoxin producing HAB Karenia brevisknown as red tidecan go beyond irritating the eyes and lungs of coastal visitors, according to Amin, as it is capable of killing fish, birds and marine mammals. No human fatalities are directly attributed to brevetoxins, he goes on to say, though it is possible to reach fatal toxin levels during K. brevis blooms.

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New space race: 3 companies vie to build space shuttle successor

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Last Updated Aug 29, 2014 9:45 PM EDT

HOUSTON - NASA is engaged in a new space race.

The agency says a decision on which company will build its next-generation vehicle to put astronauts in space is imminent. A $4 billion contract is at stake, and that's made for some intense competition.

Boeing is one of three companies competing to build the successor to the space shuttle. It hopes its CST-100 capsule will be chosen to ferry Americans to the International Space Station.

Three companies are competing for the contract to build the new craft that will ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

CBS News

John Mulholland heads Boeing's program. He knows there's a lot on the line, but he's confident.

"We've got an incredible team. Human space flight has been at our core since day one, all the way back to Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the shuttle, the station - all Boeing products developed in partnership with NASA," he said

"It's provided a lot of benefit for us to have that experience to bring to this design," Mulholland said.

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Red Planet's Climate History uncovered in Unique Meteorite

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Was Mars -- now a cold, dry place -- once a warm, wet planet that sustained life? And if so, how long has it been cold and dry?

Research underway at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory may one day answer those questions -- and perhaps even help pave the way for future colonization of the Red Planet. By analyzing the chemical clues locked inside an ancient Martian meteorite known as Black Beauty, Florida State University Professor Munir Humayun and an international research team are revealing the story of Mars' ancient, and sometimes startling, climate history.

The team's most recent finding of a dramatic climate change appeared in Nature Geoscience, in the paper "Record of the ancient Martian hydrosphere and atmosphere preserved in zircon from a Martian meteorite."

The scientists found evidence for the climate shift in minerals called zircons embedded inside the dark, glossy meteorite. Zircons, which are also abundant in the Earth's crust, form when lava cools. Among their intriguing properties, Humayun says, is that "they stick around forever."

"When you find a zircon, it's like finding a watch," Humayun said. "A zircon begins keeping track of time from the moment it's born."

Last year, Humayun's team correctly determined that the zircons in its Black Beauty sample were an astonishing 4.4 billion years old. That means, Humayun says, it formed during the Red Planet's infancy and during a time when the planet might have been able to sustain life.

"First we learned that, about 4.5 billion years ago, water was more abundant on Mars, and now we've learned that something dramatically changed that," said Humayun, a professor of geochemistry. "Now we can conclude that the conditions that we see today on Mars, this dry Martian desert, must have persisted for at least the past 1.7 billion years. We know now that Mars has been dry for a very long time."

The secret to Mars' climate lies in the fact that zircons (ZrSiO4) contain oxygen, an element with three isotopes. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons -- sort of like members of a family who share the same last name but have different first names.

On Mars, oxygen is distributed in the atmosphere (as carbon dioxide, molecular oxygen and ozone), in the hydrosphere (as water) and in rocks. In the thin, dry Martian atmosphere, the sun's ultraviolet light causes unique shifts in the proportions in which the three isotopes of oxygen occur in the different atmospheric gases.

So when water vapor that has cycled through the Martian atmosphere condenses into the Martian soil, it can interact with and exchange oxygen isotopes with zircons in the soil, effectively writing a climate record into the rocks. A warm, wet Mars requires a dense atmosphere that filters out the ultraviolet light making the unique isotope shifts disappear.

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Scientist uncovers red planet's climate history in unique meteorite

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

27-Aug-2014

Contact: Munir Humayun Humayun@magnet.fsu.edu 850-544-5740 Florida State University

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. Was Mars now a cold, dry place once a warm, wet planet that sustained life? And if so, how long has it been cold and dry?

Research underway at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory may one day answer those questions and perhaps even help pave the way for future colonization of the Red Planet. By analyzing the chemical clues locked inside an ancient Martian meteorite known as Black Beauty, Florida State University Professor Munir Humayun and an international research team are revealing the story of Mars' ancient, and sometimes startling, climate history.

The team's most recent finding of a dramatic climate change appeared in Nature Geoscience, in the paper "Record of the ancient Martian hydrosphere and atmosphere preserved in zircon from a Martian meteorite."

The scientists found evidence for the climate shift in minerals called zircons embedded inside the dark, glossy meteorite. Zircons, which are also abundant in the Earth's crust, form when lava cools. Among their intriguing properties, Humayun says, is that "they stick around forever."

"When you find a zircon, it's like finding a watch," Humayun said. "A zircon begins keeping track of time from the moment it's born."

Last year, Humayun's team correctly determined that the zircons in its Black Beauty sample were an astonishing 4.4 billion years old. That means, Humayun says, it formed during the Red Planet's infancy and during a time when the planet might have been able to sustain life.

"First we learned that, about 4.5 billion years ago, water was more abundant on Mars, and now we've learned that something dramatically changed that," said Humayun, a professor of geochemistry. "Now we can conclude that the conditions that we see today on Mars, this dry Martian desert, must have persisted for at least the past 1.7 billion years. We know now that Mars has been dry for a very long time."

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COLONIZATION OF THE MOON – Articles On Moon Colonization …

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"Lunar outpost" redirects here. For NASA's former plan to construct an outpost between 2019 and 2024, see Lunar outpost (NASA).

The colonization of the Moon is the proposed establishment of permanent human communities or robot industries[1] on the Moon.

Recent indication that water might be present in noteworthy quantities at the lunar poles has renewed interest in the Moon. Polar colonies could also avoid the problem of long lunar nights about 354 hours,[2] a little more than two weeks and take advantage of the sun continuously, at least during the local summer (there is no data for the winter yet).[3]

Permanent human habitation on a planetary body other than the Earth is one of science fiction's most prevalent themes. As technology has advanced, and concerns about the future of humanity on Earth have increased, the argument that space colonization is an achievable and worthwhile goal has gained momentum.[4][5] Because of its proximity to Earth, the Moon has been seen as the most obvious natural expansion after Earth.

The notion of siting a colony on the Moon originated before the Space Age. In 1638 Bishop John Wilkins wrote ADiscourse Concerning a New World and Another Planet, in which he predicted a human colony on the Moon.[6]Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (18571935), among others, also suggested such a step.[7] From the 1950s onwards, a number of concepts and designs have been suggested by scientists, engineers and others.

In 1954, science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke proposed a lunar base of inflatable modules covered in lunar dust for insulation.[8] A spaceship, assembled in low Earth orbit, would launch to the Moon, and astronauts would set up the igloo-like modules and an inflatable radio mast. Subsequent steps would include the establishment of a larger, permanent dome; an algae-based air purifier; a nuclear reactor for the provision of power; and electromagnetic cannons to launch cargo and fuel to interplanetary vessels in space.

In 1959, micrometeoroid shield placed above the base.

Project Horizon was a 1959 study regarding the United States Army's plan to establish a fort on the Moon by 1967.[10]Heinz-Hermann Koelle, a German rocket engineer of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) led the Project Horizon study. The first landing would be carried out by two "soldier-astronauts" in 1965 and more construction workers would soon follow. Through numerous launches (61SaturnI and 88 SaturnII), 245 tons of cargo would be transported to the outpost by 1966.

Lunex Project was a US Air Force plan for a manned lunar landing prior to the Apollo Program in 1961. It envisaged a 21-airman underground Air Force base on the Moon by 1968 at a total cost of $7.5 billion.

In 1962, solar panels, and would also overcome the problems with the long Lunar nights. For the life support system, an algae-based gas exchanger was proposed.

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