If you are looking for some spacey ringtones or computer event sounds check out the NASA Sounds page. You can have such classics as One small step for man or Houston, we have a problem. Sources include the Mercury, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions, as well as the ISS, and even bleeps and bloops from the likes of Sputnik or the Saturn Radio Emissions. They have MP3 and M4R formats, and include some general directions as well.
Last time I mentioned NASA’s Swiss Army Knife first App, the NASA App. This time, a few quick links to the modules they broke off from that monster and turned into stand alone quick loading tools. First off is the NASA TV streaming App, for watching in realtime, and comes in both an iPhone and HD iPad version. Then from JPL comes Space Images, with a monster collection of pictures that come in iPhone, iPad, and Android flavors. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent stand alone App for Twitter like there is in the NASA App, but there is a NASA Tweetup page that allows you to sync your mobile tweet interface of choice with other like minded space cases heading for a specific real world event. That gives you some of the functionality of the first App, but there are also some new Apps that do entirely different things: more on them next time.
One of the best NASA Apps is simply called the NASA App, and besides the iPhone version they also made one for Android, and rolled out an HD version for the iPad. It is a monster with a ton of functions, including launch info with countdown clocks, current mission status, a huge library of images and videos, the latest news and feature stories, the Tweet feed from the various agency sources (in fact an entire Facebook and Twitter client interface to make it easy to interact with them), a live stream from NASA TV, and so much more. This was NASA’s very first official App, and while I hail its completeness, the kitchen sink approach has its drawbacks. They did end up breaking out most of the more popular functions into their own stand alone Apps, so you didn’t have to wait for everything to load or wade through a large menu when you just wanted to check the tweets or watch the live stream for example. More on those individual Apps in the next NASA Apps entry.
The NASA Visualization Explorer is a free app that allows you to explore a lot of the science NASA is doing on space-based Earth research. Topics covered include climate change, wildfires, glaciers, hurricanes, volcanoes and more. If it can be observed from an orbital platform, they will cover it sooner or later. This is a great way to get a comprehensive overview on how the planet is doing, and it is not just raw data dumps from the satellites. There are a lot of comprehensive yet concise presentations here, including narrated slide shows and full video presentations. They claim it is for the iPad only, but I am going to see if it will run on my iTouch; it looks like they have some data-dense screens you wouldn’t be able to read the text from but most of the presentations should play just fine on the small screen. You can grab it on iTunes.
One of the early geniuses of the space age, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born on this day in 1857. He was pretty much the first person to put forth the idea that you could use a rocket to go into space, he worked out a lot of the principles of space flight, and he designed the first space stations.
Physicist Michio Kaku, the originator of Sci-Fi Science on the Discovery Channel, recently got together with The Daily and explained the latest advances that may finally make the Space Elevator a real possibility.
Like space stations and airlocks, this is another space technology originally proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky back in 1895, long before most of his contemporaries consider space as someplace you would go. Along with Germany’s Hermann Oberth and America’s Robert H. Goddard, Russia’s Tsiolkovsky completed the trio who invented rocketry and astronautics, paving the way for today’s modern space programs from around the world.
With the development of Buckey Tubes (Named after Buckminster Fuller who designed the geodesic structure they use, they also named Fullerines aka Buckey Balls after him), or carbon nanotubes as they are also known, we finally have a material both light enough and strong enough to build the elevators. At the moment we can only build Buckey Tubes in small batches, so they are used for things like Biochip interfaces, Nano Radio control systems and other microscopic to nanoscopic scale projects. But now that we have been building them for such applications for the last decade or so, we are beginning to ramp up he production batch sizes, so the space elevator may be able to begin serious construction in another decade or 3. Thanks to the Science News Blog for the heads up on this one.