Hip-hop musician will.i.am's "Reach for the Stars" officially became the first song broadcast from Mars today, thanks to a signal beamed from NASA's Curiosity rover.
"This is the first time that a song's ever come from another planet," Leland Melvin, NASA's associate administrator for education and a former astronaut, told students at an educational event at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Why they say the sky is the limit When I’ve seen the footprints on the moon Why do they say the sky is the limit When I’ve seen the footprints on the moon And I know the sky might be high But baby it ain’t really that high And I know that Mars might be far But baby it ain’t really that far Let’s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let’s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let’s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let’s reach for the stars (Let, let, let, let me see your hands up) (Let me see your hands up) Can’t nobody hold us back They can’t hold us down They can’t keep us trapped Tie us to the ground Told your people that We don’t mess around When we turn it up Please don’t turn us down We will turn it up Louder than we were before Like the lion out the jungle, you can hear us roar When I lie in here, it’s like a sonic blaster Flying just like NASA, out of space master
Hands up, reach for the sky Hands up, get ‘em up high Hands up, if you really feel alive Live it up, live it up Why they say the sky is the limit When I’ve seen the footprints on the moon Why do they say the sky is the limit When I’ve seen the footprints on the moon And I know the sky might be high But baby it ain’t really that high And I know that Mars might be far But baby it ain’t really that far Let’s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let’s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let’s reach for the stars Reach for the stars Let’s reach for the stars Source: Cosmiclog
Posted by
Mr. TechnologyTuesday, August 14, 20120
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WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.
Scientists warn of possible solar storm in 2014.
An expert panel found that this phenomenon, more and more common, occur within the next two years and may affect global electrical systems and satellites in orbit.
Usually we are used to understand the concept of "natural disaster" in phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves and tsunamis. However, a group of NASA scientists warned of an event that is still contingency plans in the world, solar storms.
Solar storms are phenomena which have been heard enough in recent times but could increase with the years.
The panel found that by 2014 the world will face a wave could affect solar electricity systems, communications and satellites around the world.
This could be the biggest event in a cycle of 10 years in the activity of the star and, if filed, would be the first in more than 100 years.
Among the possible consequences that could cause the magnetically charged plasma on earth, is the melting of the electrical transformers in the world, damage satellites and communication systems.
The last solar storm of this magnitude occurred in 1859. At the time, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed the large solar flare and timed the arrival of geomagnetic storms caused by the phenomenon to Earth with a delay of about 17 hours.
According to reports at the time, the solar storm was so massive that formed northern lights that could be seen much further south than where they usually are.
The question that remains for NASA experts is what the actual impact of a storm of this nature, taking into account the number of satellites in orbit and the effects of their damage globally.
Posted by
Mr. TechnologyMonday, August 13, 20120
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WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.
Obama calls NASA Curiosity Team: If you find any martian even a microbe, I want to know about it right away.
President Obama Calls Curiosity Team
President Obama phoned the team at JPL on Monday, Aug. 13, to congratulate them on the successful landing of Curiosity. "It's inspiring to all of us. Photographs that are coming back are going to be remarkable and amazing," President Obama said.
"If, in fact, you do make contact with Martians, please let me know right away. I've got a lot of other things on my plate, but I suspect that that would go to the top of the list, even if they're just microbes," he said.
Posted by
Mr. TechnologyTuesday, August 7, 20120
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WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.
NASA releases video and color photo,of Mars rover landing.
NASA has released a low resolution video of the Curiosity Rover during the final few minutes of its decent to the Martian surface . Video silent.
Curiosity snaps the first color view of the north wall and rim of Gale Crater, where NASA's Mars rover landed Sunday night. The picture was taken by the rover's camera at the end of its stowed robotic arm and appears fuzzy because of dust on the camera's cover.
The color photo from the ancient crater where Curiosity landed showed a pebbly landscape and the rim of Gale Crater off in the distance. Curiosity snapped the photo on the first day on the surface after touching down on Mars Sunday night.
The rover took the shot with a camera at the end of its robotic arm, which remained stowed. The landscape looked fuzzy because the camera's removable cover was coated with dust that kicked up during the descent to the ground.
NASA celebrated the precision landing of a rover on Mars and marveled over the mission's flurry of photographs — grainy, black-and-white images of Martian gravel, a mountain at sunset and, most exciting of all, the spacecraft's plunge through the red planet's atmosphere.
Curiosity, a roving laboratory the size of a compact car, landed right on target late Sunday after an eight-month, 352-million-mile journey. It parked its six wheels about four miles from its ultimate science destination — Mount Sharp, rising from the floor of Gale Crater near the equator.
Extraordinary efforts were needed for the landing because the rover weighs one ton, and the thin Martian atmosphere offers little friction to slow down a spacecraft. Curiosity had to go from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, unfurling a parachute, then firing rockets to brake. In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered it to the ground at 2 mph.
At the end of what NASA called "seven minutes of terror," the vehicle settled into place almost perfectly flat in the crater it was aiming for.
"We have ended one phase of the mission much to our enjoyment," mission manager Mike Watkins said. "But another part has just begun."
The nuclear-powered Curiosity will dig into the Martian surface to analyze what's there and hunt for some of the molecular building blocks of life, including carbon.
It won't start moving for a couple of weeks, because all the systems on the $2.5 billion rover have to be checked out. Color photos and panoramas will start coming in the next few days.
But first NASA had to use tiny cameras designed to spot hazards in front of Curiosity's wheels. So early images of gravel and shadows abounded. The pictures were fuzzy, but scientists were delighted.
The photos show "a new Mars we have never seen before," Watkins said. "So every one of those pictures is the most beautiful picture I have ever seen."
In one of the photos from the close-to-the-ground hazard cameras, if you squinted and looked the right way, you could see "a silhouette of Mount Sharp in the setting sun," said an excited John Grotzinger, chief mission scientist from the California Institute of Technology.
A high-resolution camera on the orbiting 7-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying 211 miles directly above the plummeting Curiosity, snapped a photo of the rover dangling from its parachute about a minute from touchdown. The parachute's design can be made out in the photo.
"It's just mind-boggling to me," said Miguel San Martin, chief engineer for the landing team.
Curiosity is the heaviest piece of machinery NASA has landed on Mars, and the success gave the space agency confidence that it can unload equipment that astronauts may need in a future manned trip to the red planet.
The landing technique was hatched in 1999 in the wake of devastating back-to-back Mars spacecraft losses. Back then, engineers had no clue how to land super-heavy spacecraft. They brainstormed different possibilities, consulting Apollo-era engineers and pilots of heavy-lift helicopters.
"I think its engineering at its finest. What engineers do is they make the impossible possible," said former NASA chief technologist Bobby Braun. "This thing is elegant. People say it looks crazy. Each system was designed for a very specific function."
Because of budget constraints, NASA canceled its joint U.S.-European missions to Mars, scheduled for 2016 and 2018.
"When's the next lander on Mars? The answer to that is nobody knows," Bolden said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
But if Curiosity finds something interesting, he said, it could spur the public and Congress to provide more money for more Martian exploration. No matter what, he said, Curiosity's mission will help NASA as it tries to send astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.
Posted by
Mr. TechnologyTuesday, July 24, 20120
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WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.
Science: NASA: Strange and sudden massive melt in Greenland.
Nearly all of Greenland's massive ice sheet suddenly started melting a bit this month, a freak event that surprised scientists.
Even Greenland's coldest and highest place, Summit station, showed melting. Ice core records show that last happened in 1889 and occurs about once every 150 years.
Three satellites show what NASA calls unprecedented melting of the ice sheet that blankets the island, starting on July 8 and lasting four days. Most of the thick ice remains. While some ice usually melts during the summer, what was unusual was that the melting happened in a flash and over a widespread area.
"You literally had this wave of warm air wash over the Greenland ice sheet and melt it," NASA ice scientist Tom Wagner said Tuesday.
The ice melt area went from 40 percent of the ice sheet to 97 percent in four days, according to NASA. Until now, the most extensive melt seen by satellites in the past three decades was about 55 percent.
Wagner said researchers don't know how much of Greenland's ice melted, but it seems to be freezing again.
"When we see melt in places that we haven't seen before, at least in a long period of time, it makes you sit up and ask what's happening?" NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said. It's a big signal, the meaning of which we're going to sort out for years to come."
About the same time, a giant iceberg broke off from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland. And the National Snow and Ice Data Center on Tuesday announced that the area filled with Arctic sea ice continues near a record low.
Wagner and other scientists said because this Greenland-wide melting has happened before they can't yet determine if this is a natural rare event or one triggered by man-made global warming. But they do know that the edges of Greenland's ice sheets have already been thinning because of climate change.
Summer in Greenland has been freakishly warm so far. That's because of frequent high pressure systems that have parked over the island, bringing warm clear weather that melts ice and snow, explained University of Georgia climatologist Thomas Mote.
He and others say it's similar to the high pressure systems that have parked over the American Midwest bringing record-breaking warmth and drought.
Ohio State University ice scientist Jason Box, who returned Tuesday from a three-week visit, said he ditched his cold weather gear for the cotton pants that he normally dons in Nevada.
"It was sunny and warm and all the locals were talking about how sunny it was," Box said after getting off a plane. "Beyond T-shirt weather."
