Tag: NASA
Floating ominously inside the Apexart gallery is a massive, crinkly, mirrored balloon. It is a reconstructed version of NASA’s 1958 “Beacon Inflatable Satellite,” an early “sateloon” prototype that marked the beginnings of human space exploration. The Beacon was a preliminary model for Echo 1, a much larger version launched by NASA in 1960 that was […]
For its inaugural mission to the International Space Station, NASA’s new nonprofit CASIS enlisted Shepard Fairey to create the smart-looking patch above, which each astronaut will wear on their shoulder. It’s not the first time a street artist has sent work to space, but it might be the most official. “I wanted to convey the […]
Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks… No, wait, thousands of years before that, the Babylonians would gaze at the night sky and name constellations based on mythological figures they vaguely envisioned in the stars. Some of those very old school names remain relevant. And now, there’s Photoshop, so British illustrator Chris Keegan does the imagining […]
In Colorado, where it’s legal to possess weed for recreational use but still a crime to sell it, one former NASA scientist is teaching enterprising smokers how to grow their own perfectly legal bud at home. The name of his cannabis classroom: HASH (High Altitude School of Hydroponics). Dale J. Chamberlain cut his teeth designing and building […]
Scientists have discovered not one but two new moons of Pluto recently–one in 2011 and another last year–and the team that discovered both has decided to crowdsource their names. They’ve set up a poll in which you can vote from a selection 12 names, including such badass options as Cerberus, Hercules, and Hypnos, or write […]
The above image comes from NASA’s Black Marble series of satellite photos, which caused quite a stir when it was released online last month–look at all the beautiful lights, the tiny cities! But as it turns out, one of those clusters of illumination isn’t a city at all; it’s an enormous cluster of fracking outposts, sending hundreds […]
Remember the first time you tasted freeze-dried astronaut ice cream from the science museum gift shop, wondering… Where does space food come from? Why does it taste so funny? What is it like to eat while drifting through the cosmos? NASA’s Space Food Systems Laboratory (SFSL) is responsible for making sure that astronauts can munch on a […]
The newest addition to NASAs fleet of spacecraft may be filled with air, as the agency awarded a $17.8 million contract to Bigelow Aerospace to develop an inflatable extension to the International Space Station. Though it sounds a bit like sci-fi fantasy, inflatable space technology is very real, and has been in place since the […]
Remember last month, when NASA purposefully crashed two of its unmanned spacecraft into the surface of the moon at around 4,000 miles per hour? It turns out both probes, dubbed Ebb and Flow, were recording video on their final kamikaze mission, rendering the above beautiful footage of the lunar surface sailing by. But I can’t […]
I know it’s unscience-like to gush over how trippy the Moon looks like in this visualisation of its gravitational field, measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL). I’ve been informed that only stoned teenagers giggle at the psychedelic visual coolness of fractals, so I can’t get too excited about this map of the most […]
