January 3, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Continuing our series on the evolutions that can be expected over the coming decade, we look at new directions in particle physics, media technologies that are enabling not only greater freedom, but a new communicative paradigm which will, in part, help steer us to the great discoveries of this moment in history, and a vital new understanding of global economic patterns, which will revolutionize the way governments around the world plan for domestic spending and trade policy.
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December 16, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The above image, captured by and transmitted from the Hubble Space Telescope, in orbit around the Earth, shows the largest star-forming region in the vicinity of our Milky Way galaxy. According to NASA: “The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.”
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December 10, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The deepest image ever taken of the universe, using the ultra-powerful Hubble Space Telescope, known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, shows there to be 100 billion galaxies in the universe, some projecting light from a distance of 47 billion light years. A study of the Doppler redshift of galaxies speeding away from the Hubble’s vantage point has allowed astronomers to create a 3-dimensional projection of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, the deepest photograph ever taken of the observable universe.
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July 20, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The US space agency NASA’s Apollo 11 mission was the first to land a human being on the surface of the Moon, on 20 July 1969. The lunar module, known as Eagle, landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the Moon. They spent one day there, and both stepped outside the lander to explore the otherworldly environment.
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May 11, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis took off this afternoon at 2:01 EDT, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. The mission —STS-125— will be the last scheduled mission to service the 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope, in an effort to extend its working life at least 5 more years into the future. It will entail at least 5 planned spacewalks to repair and upgrade the telescope’s equipment and power-sourcing.
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May 4, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
The US-based Science Channel will be showing the last mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope live. The mission is the last of its kind in a prolonged service regime planned for the telescope, after a global campaign to prevent the project’s premature cancellation. The Hubble Space Telescope is the single most successful technical instrument in terms of producing new discoveries from probing the distant universe.
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January 4, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The twin Mars rover projects NASA launched over 5 years ago, which landed the Spirit rover on 3 January 2004 and the Opportunity rover on 24 January 2004, which planned only 3 months of research, are still roving, gathering data and transmitting new discoveries back to Earth, after 5 years at work on the desolate red planet. Specifically, the rovers have revealed a great deal of information about water around the Martian equator billions of years in the past.
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December 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
A hybrid super-computer has reached the astounding speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, termed a petaflop. The Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory operates on a conventional paradigm of computational mechanics — meaning it operates over semiconductors and established systems of computer circuitry, not quantum computing innovations or molecular processors.
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