Archive for category Science
How Awesome is Hubble? (Answer: So Awesome)
Posted by jasoncross in Science on October 1, 2009
Back in May, NASA sent a crew of astronauts to the Hubble Space Telescope for the last time. STS-125 was an amazingly complex and risky mission, but also a smashing success. The crew fixed what wasn’t working and installed a bunch of new sensors and cameras and whoozits and whatchma-bobs. It took some months to test and calibrate and make sure everything was working, but we’re now getting back some new images from the greatest telescope ever built. And they’re awesome.
Cell Phone Radiation Chart
Posted by jasoncross in Science on September 28, 2009
The Environmental Working Group has a neat chart online that lists the amount of radiation leaked by most current cell phones. The ranking is in watt per kilogram (a measure of what engineers call “specific absorption rate” or SAR). Bear in mind that the FCC regulation limit is 1.6 W/kg, and there are quite a few phones that get incredibly close and a few that even hit 1.6 W/kg right on the head. That’s 1.6 W/kg measured over a gram of tissue or fluid, by the way.
Photos from the USS Hornet
Posted by jasoncross in San Francisco, Science on September 12, 2009
The USS Hornet is a WWII-era aircraft carrier that has the distinction of being the ship that collected the Apollo 11 module after splashdown. It’s now a permanent museum docked in Oakland.
I recently attended a press event aboard the ship, and snapped a few photos along the way. The best way to view them is on my flickr page, so you can grab the full-sized images if you want. There’s some neat stuff in there. The painted footprints are Neil Armstrong’s first steps after getting back aboard the ship – his first steps “on earth” after walking around on the moon. The command module you see is similar to, but not the same one used on Apollo 11 (the Apollo 11 module, CSM-107, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum).
Go check out the set, let me know what you think. There are only 8 photos (I won’t bore you with shots of 24 monitors running from a single PC and so on).
NASA To Release Restored Moonwalk Footage
Posted by jasoncross in Science on July 14, 2009
Keep your eye on the NASA site this Thursday, July 16. A press release today says they’re going to hold a press conference to release new footage from Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 moonwalk. (Poor Michael Collins, orbiting the moon in the Command Module at the time. He never gets any credit.)
Some of this footage has been lost for almost 40 years, so this is probably going to be the best look at the moonwalk any of us have ever had. Even back when it was “live on TV”, the quality of the broadcast and people’s TV sets in 1969 was a lot worse than even today’s middle-of-the-road web video, let alone HDTV.
Hard to believe that the 16th will be the 40 year anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, and the 20th will be 40 years since we actually walked on the moon for the first time. It’s even harder to believe we haven’t sent anyone back since 1972. Imagine where we’d be today if we had continued regular manned missions to the moon over the last 37 years?