Posts tagged NASA
This time-lapse shot from the International Space Station reveals the Milky Way as storms illuminate Africa below. The video is courtesy of the Crew Earth Observations group at NASA Johnson Space Center.
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Capturing bits & pieces on media, politics, culture & daily life
even astronauts can cast a ballot!
How Space Station Astronauts Can Vote
Two U.S. citizens may be hundreds of miles above the nearest polling booth, but they still cast their ballots.
Astronauts residing on the orbiting lab receive a digital version of their ballot, which is beamed up by Mission Control at the agency’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. Filled-out ballots find their way back down to Earth along the same path.
This system was made possible by a 1997 bill passed by Texas legislators (nearly all NASA astronauts live in or around Houston). It was first used that same year by David Wolf, who happened to be aboard Russia’s Mir space station at the time.
Party in the sky tonight!
There’s the supermoon—the biggest moon of 2012, and the annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower. The supermoon is expected to outshine the shooting stars, but NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke says some fireballs may be visible.
Photo: Supermoon rising near Lincoln Memorial, March 19, 2011.
Photo Credit: Bevery & Pack.
good:
A Gorgeous Time-Lapse of Lighting Storms Over Africa From Space
The world is beautiful, especially from a view like this.
NASA on the asteroid that will come close to smashing into Earth tonight, but won’t.
(Source: news.discovery.com)
A satellite designed to study the Earth’s weather and climate launched into space aboard a Delta II rocket early Friday.
(Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Fires in Texas viewed from the International Space Station
(via matthewkeys)
The Life of Hurricane Irene from Caribbean to Canada
An animation of satellite observations from August 21 through August 29 showing the birth of Hurricane Irene in the Caribbean and her track over Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, the Bahamas, the U.S. East Coast and into Canada. At her strongest, Irene grew to a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale and made landfalls in North Carolina, New Jersey and New York.
Space shuttle: History in the making - in pictures
Photograph: Nasa
We have brought together some of the iconic images from the space shuttle’s three decades of service. The pictures are not in chronological order but follow the typical course of a mission, recording the triumphs and disasters along the way
npr:
This image of space shuttle Atlantis was taken shortly after the rotating service structure was rolled back at Launch Pad 39A, Thursday, July 7, 2011. Atlantis is set to liftoff today, Friday, July 8, at 11:26 a.m. EDT on the final flight of the Space Shuttle Program.
We also have a nice video retrospective of the shuttle program over at NPR.org. —Wright
In 1981, when the shuttle program was in its infancy, many thought it seemed unreal. Now, as Atlantis readies to take the program’s final flight, space enthusiasts are looking back at the 30 years as a golden chapter in human exploration.
Largest full moon in 18 years on Saturday
- Move over, superman. A “supermoon” will grace the skies as it rises on the east at sunset this Saturday, NASA reported. It is the largest full moon in 18 years.
Discovery Lands for Final Time at Cape Canaveral: After a 13-day mission, NASA’s space shuttle Discovery landed in Cape Canaveral today for the final time. Discovery leaves behind a historic legacy, having made 39 space missions and travelling more than 148 million miles. It has carried nearly 250 crew members in the past 27 years
(Source: youtube.com)
A Discover blog pointed out this one-of-a-kind image of the moon, compiled from about 1,300 separate images taken over two weeks from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s wide-angle camera.
Discover calls it the highest resolution picture ever taken of the near side of the moon.
FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY On Valentine’s Day (ET) the Sun unleashed one of its most powerful explosions, an X-class flare. The blast was the largest so far in the new solar cycle. Erupting from active region AR1158 in the Sun’s southern hemisphere, the flare is captured here in this extreme ultraviolet image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The intense burst of electromagnetic radiation momentarily overwhelmed pixels in SDO’s detectors causing the bright vertical blemish. This X-class flare was also accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME), a massive cloud of charged particles traveling outward at nearly 900 kilometers per second. (Photo: APOD / NASA)
