Fark.com ran a photoshop contest… take a photo and photoshop it to be funny. The photo this time came from NASA… and it’s just kinda begging to be photoshopped.
Photoshop this exciting NASA wind tunnel project
Here’s the original unretouched image. I assume the pink color is due to special paint, presumably pressure-sensitive paint that changes color.
Insert lame low-brow innuendo-laden joke HERE.
NASA has just released a report on a Europa lander mission. I haven’t read all the way through it (in fact, I’ve just glanced through it), but it seems fairly extensive. The lander design itself seems pretty preliminary. It also looks like a walking “rover,” but the legs are just long in order to allow the lander to safely come to rest on whatever terrain it happens to land on.
The lander would have instruments meant to look for the signs of life. Pretty obviously, the chances of life appearing *anywhere* near the surface of Europa are as close to zero as you can get. However, assuming that many, many kilometers below there is a liquid water ocean, and assuming that there is recognizable life swimming or floating around in the water, chances are fairly good that bits of it, everything from biochemicals on up to actual critters, would get trapped in the ice. Over extremely long periods of time the cold, icy equivalent of geological processes might drag that stuff up to the surface, where it might be detectable.
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You can download the report here:
Some of the illustrations:
A sizable tornado hit the NASA-Michoud facility near New Orleans yesterday. Few injuries are reported, but there is reported to be some substantial damage. The old ET-GVTA test article from the Shuttle program was reportedly “blown to bits.”
In December of 1948, American media outlets reported that Defense Secretary Forrestal had announced that the US wanted a space station for military purposes. The US had, in fact, been working on space for military applications since the end of World War II with both the US Navy and US Air Force studying space launch systems as early as 1944. However, the 1948 space station was most likely just a talking point, something that the Pentagon would *like* to have for any of a number of military purposes. So far as I’m aware, no actual designs produced by relevant government or corporate design bureaus have come to light. Still, the lack of anything firm to base an artists impression on didn’t slow down the media; a number of newspaper and magazine artists impressions were produced. Many of them, such as the one below (from the December 31, 1948, Washington Daily News, via an EBay auction), demonstrate a substantial lack of understanding of, well, *everything*. They tended to be a weird mishmash of Flash Gordon sci-fantasy with the V-2 and similar exotic and half-comprehended technologies.
Note that this cartoonish “space station” seems to have it all… radar, giant cannon barrels and a square mirror to reflect sunlight to set the enemy alight. This, of course, would not work.
My first idiot thought was “this is what dancing in zero gravity will look like.” Then I actually put some thought into it and realized “no, it won’t.” Not even a little bit. The majority of the moves here are reaction-driven… airflow pushing differentially on the body due to the aerodynamic configuration of the moment. In zero-g, this sort of airflow would promptly cause the subject to get sucked into the fan inlet or blown out the hole into space; if there’s no or minimal airflow, the dancer might still make the moves, but there’ll be little in the way of actually spinning and tumbling, and none in the way of swooping around. To make that happen a dancer would have to be equipped with some form of reaction control system. *Possibly * (but unwisely) done with compressed gas jets at the hands and feet; the environmental control system would have to compress the atmosphere just as fast as the dancer releases thrust-gas, or else the environment will begin to overpressurize. Another solution would be to have fan-based thrusters at hands and feet. Maybe a backpack turbocompressor. Any case would doubtless be noisy as hell. Power consumption for the fans, reaction mass consumption for the cold gas system would all be quite high. Substantial risk of banging into stuff or losing control and spinning dangerously fast. Those are all very good points. But, consider this: the dancer would get to fly around like Iron Man.
Well, crap. Seems the blades of the turbopumps crack more than they should… to the point where NASA has apparently said that they form an unacceptable risk for manned launches. Additionally, it’s reported that neither SpaceX nor Boeing will be able to lunch astronauts into orbit in 2018… meaning the US will need to rely on the good graces of the Russians for that much longer.
A new teaser for the forthcoming and probably unseeable “Star Trek: Discovery” has been released:
Not a lot of clarity is revealed here. However, a few images quickly flash by showing ships. One shows different views of what is presumably the USS Discovery; the other shows a wireframe of presumably a different Federation ship (though who knows, perhaps they’ve redesigned the Discovery). In any event, it’s clear they’re continuing the sad practice of making ships that -recede the TOS Enterprise look decades more “advanced.” Meh.
The Cassini Saturn probe is nearing the end of its life. And NASA is sending it out in the best way possible, with increasingly close passes of the ring plane. They’re getting some fine imagery out of the process. The image below is a closeup of the A ring showing density waves caused by the moons Janus and Epimetheus. There are also a lot of little artifacts in the image… specks and streaks, caused by cosmic rays smacking into the CCD during imaging.
Just sold on EBay (not to me, sadly) is a kinda rough Topping display model of a little known proposed variant of the Atlas space launcher, the SLV-3X. This design had a widened body, from ten feet to 12 feet, 7 inches. This allowed for more propellant to be carried without lengthening the vehicle, meaning that the existing launch infrastructure could be used. Additionally, the MA-5 sustainer rocket engine would be replaced with a higher thrust H-1D engine. See HERE for stats.
The SDASM Flickr account has a nice illustration of the SLV-3X/Centaur. See their site for the higher rez image.
Here’s your new productivity-buster:
They are available at the CIAs online reading room. Forget the rubbish about psychics and aliens… I’m’a be lookin’ up keywords such as “suntan” and “gusto” and “skunk works.” Find anything good, post a link in the comments.
