So proud of local STEM role model and DSHA graduate Dr. Kathryn Weiss! She is the senior flight software engineer on the MSL who celebrated Curiousity’s landing earlier this week!
nasa
Showing 58 posts tagged nasa
“Seriously getting teary seeing so many people who normally disagree ALL WATCHING HUMANITY LAND SOMETHING ON MARS. #UnityThruSPACE #MSL”
via @Joi_the_artist
Explore Kennedy Space Center with Street View
For fifty years, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida has been the launch point for a generation of space technology and exploration. Countless enthusiasts (including this one) grew up longing to see a space shuttle up close and walk in the paths of astronauts. Today, a collaboration between NASA and Street View is enabling people around the world to take a trip to the doorway to outer space, and see Kennedy as it transitions into a multipurpose launch complex for the next 50 years of space innovation. This location is our largest special collection of Street View imagery to date, totaling 6,000 panoramic views of the facilities, and expanding our mission to document the world’s most amazing places.
High-res
thesunproject reminds you:
The June Solstice Approacheth!
There’s no mystical occurrences happening on June 20 (at 23:09 UTC, to be exact), but this is a key point in the Earth’s path around the Sun. It’s also the best day to mount your solargraphs to get solstice-to-solstice images. Don’t worry if you don’t get them up by Wednesday, you’ll still get great pictures no matter what.
What is the June Solstice?
Due to the axial tilt of the Earth, the June solstice marks the point in Earth’s orbit when the Sun reaches its highest maximum point in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere, and the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere. The sun will appear straight overhead along the Tropic of Cancer, but nowhere else (despite some commonly held beliefs). Ancient cultures gave the day much spiritual significance, but today it’s just the beginning of summer (or winter, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere).
Good luck getting those cameras up this week! Keep spreading the word so we can get every continent represented, and here’s our how-to video on building a pinhole cam.
The Sun Project is a really cool new tumblr that you could use in your classroom. Have students build a pinhole cam (suggesting the “something delicious” is soda) and explore this tumblr and other solar resources:
Time lapse video of the transit of Venus
jkottke wows with:
Venus passed in front of the Sun yesterday for the last time until 2117. The transit took almost seven hours but this NASA video shows it in under a minute.
High-res
American teacher blasts off to space
Former teacher and present U.S. astronaut will rocket up to the International Space Station on Monday for a six-month expedition.
Veteran shuttle mission specialist Joe Acaba will be the first NASA “educator astronaut” to fly a long-duration mission aboard the orbital laboratory, and he is eager to get under way.
What the Space Shuttle booster saw
Whoa, 1:57! The best video you’ll see (and hear) all day.
You’ve likely seen other videos taken from cameras attached to the Space Shuttle and its boosters, but this is one is exceptional in two regards: it’s in HD and the sound has been remastered by Skywalker Sound.
…
High-res
The Scale of the Universe - Interactive
Flash Animation Credit & Copyright: Cary & Michael Huang
I found this scale of the universe on one of my favorite websites the other day and thought both the science and math departments would enjoy it. The link is to an interactive program that lets you zoom in and out in powers of ten and see the scale of the universe from the large (the visible universe) to the small (quantum foam). The program is a lot of fun and very interactive.
via APUSMonty
Elm Grove teachers soar with NASA
Students at St. Mary’s Visitation Catholic Parish School in Elm Grove took their science experiments to the skies last week when three of their teachers took a ride on the NASA Explorer Schools Reduced Gravity Flight.
For one experiment, students studied inertial balance by attaching film canisters with different weights to the end of a long blade. Using the blade like a flexible arm, the students pulled back the blade as if to fling it and counted the number of times it swung back and forth to measure the inertia of the film canisters. Another experiment looked at the interplay of force, mass and distance as students projected metal ball bearings at different angles with different amounts of force and with different weights. The third experiment tested densities of different liquids. Students examined how quickly a weight could fall through apple juice, vegetable oil and corn syrup.
jtotheizzoe shares NASA’s:
Blue Marble 2012
See, when you look at this on your Dashboard, it isn’t going to do it justice. Instead, click here, because viewing HD pictures of Earth at 8000 x 8000 px is really where it’s at.
This video was created for students about science fairs.
It was created by a student, Kevin Temmer, as part of his community outreach project in high school and is an animated video that teaches students about the science fair. NASA, the National Science Foundation and National Geographic have featured this video.
Kevin would like more students to view this to help inspire them to participate in science fairs and pursue science careers. It’s also a good example of the kinds of projects that students can do outside of the typical assignments.
The force is strong with jtotheizzoe:
NASA and MIT Are Building Android-Powered Light-Saber Training Droids
Or something like that, from their appearance. More at the MIT SPHERES project page.
More on this project from from GoogleNexus in this video:
(by SSLramirez)
Mars Rover Opportunity Has Confirmed (Past) Liquid Water On Red Planet!
As NASA scientists put it, this is a “slam dunk” piece of proof that water once flowed on or under the planet’s surface. And this is more than ice, it’s evidence of flowing water, and lots of it. How do they know that?
Gypsum (the white stuff in the vein up there) is a non-metal mineral made up of calcium sulfate. But on Earth it is known to be made up of not only the calcium and the sulfate, but also water (it’s “hydrous”). Moreover, it occurs naturally from the evaporation of massive, mineral-rich lakes or seas. And that means that water must have stood, flowed, pooled, and evaporated at some point on Mars.
Not bad for a rover that was only supposed to last 90 Martian days!
(images above from NASA/JPL, lulz by me)
via jtotheizzoe
(via itsfullofstars)
Follow the twitter feed at @MarsCuriosity
via itsfullofstars
Time lapse sequences of photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011.
