The NASA Valkyrie Robot looks like a useful toy to have to help build the Mars base, or any other non-terrestrial habitat. Unfortunately it didn’t do so good in the Darpa Challenge, tying for last place, but NASA JPL’s Robosimian came in at 5th place.
Your picture will be taken tomorrow, so be sure to look up and smile and wave for the camera. The camera is on the Cassini Spacecraft, and it will be taking a picture of the Earth from the shadow of Saturn (because taking a picture of the Sun does bad things to unprotected cameras). This is a recreation of the original Pale Blue Dot event, when Voyager took a picture of Earth from beyond the orbit of Neptune. Take a peek at the last time Cassini took our picture in 2006 to get an idea of just how amazing an image this could be. The woman who headed the Voyager imaging team in 1990 and is on board the Cassini imaging team taking these photos, Carolyn Porco, wrote a great article about the event you should check out. About the only part of the project I am not in favor of is their Message to the Milky Way transmission on the anniversary of the event, using Earth’s strongest Radio Telescope as the transmitter. Why let the Berserker’s know we are here before we have to? Thanks to Richard Branson for the heads up on this one; while I got Carolyn’s tweet about it, Richards blog entry had lots of juicy details.
Friends of the Planetary Society, founded by Carl Sagan and others to promote the colonization of space, have a Kickstarter project: ARKYD. The team at Planetary Resources has begun a project for mining the asteroids, starting with the ones featured in all those tweets from Low Flying Rocks which come much closer to the Earth than a lot of folks find comfortable. Step one is finding them heading our way when they are still far enough away that we have time to intercept them, and for that they are launching a gaggle of small telescopes specially designed to see the faint reflected light from their surfaces. And when there aren’t any rocks fling at us, they can use the telescope farm to monitor interesting things, like Jupiter and Saturn. One of the telescopes will be used to allow pretty much anyone who wants to contribute to take their own pictures of the things that interest them from an orbiting telescope, or have a picture of their choosing photographed in space, with the Earth as a backdrop. There are still 11 days until the project funding window closes, and they have made over $900,000 of their one million dollar goal, so you still have time to contribute and help make this project happen! And, if you contribute a hundred dollars or more, you also get a years membership in The Planetary Society along with the other rewards.
This Kickstart project will do exactly that: Put a Tardis in Orbit! It is on a par with an AM-SAT or OSCAR launch in that it is an amateur satellite launch, except without the radio relay functions. It does include a computer to operate the passive positioning system that will allow the camera to take pictures of Earth, and a low power transmitter to send those images back to earth. I like the project, and I like that attitude of the father/daughter team who put it together, so I have to contribute to this one. Check out the video to see what I mean about attitude.
If you didn’t make it to the Smithsonian’s Air And Space Museum a few weeks ago for the presentation of the Star Trek’s Continuing Relevance symposium, it is now posted to Ustream, and I have embedded it here for your edification.
Video streaming by Ustream
The world as seen from space in HD; UrtheCast is mounting a couple of HD cameras on the ISS. And the UrtheCast partner, The Science Channel, will be using the video stream to create programming around. I think this channel is going to become my video wallpaper.