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.
This amazing chunk of video is a set of time lapsed filming done of the skies over (and near) Kirkenes, Norway. They had an unusually active Aurora Borealis this past month, and it only promises to get better in the next few years, as solar activity peaks. This and many other similar incredible images can be found at the APoD, the Astronomy Picture of the Day at NASA.
The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.
This song is an excellent tune about the subject of leaving this gravity well, and in 1978 it won the 5th annual Science Fiction Film Awards prize for best song. That was the first year the awards ceremony was broadcast, but it is much better known under the name The Saturn Awards. I have no clue who had the idea that William Shatner should be the vocalist for this presentation, but as musical performances go it has a certain amusement value, and is certainly historically interesting. I have to think he played this up for the chuckle value, considering his excellent renditions of other songs, including Common People from Has Been and the Brutus Rap from Free Enterprise.
My personal favorite from the various artists who have rendered it over the years has to be the Kate Bush version. A noticeable percentage of her work were original science fiction songs, such as Experiment Number 4 where the military was developing a musical weapon. Or Lyra, her tribute to the book The Golden Compass, which someone later used footage from the movie to turn into a wonderful video. Or Cloudbusting which depicted the governments reaction to Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Energy research, and Donald Southerland made a wonderful Reich. If you are a humor fan, be sure to check out her duet with Rowan Atkinson.
Morning Jacket also did a version of the song, but this is the only one I know from them. Someone did a nice but low-rez job of adding space footage to this.
And finally, getting my vote for strangest video for a planetary exploration song, David Fonseca does the entire song backwards and in high heels as Ginger Rogers used to say when explaining why she was a better dancer than Fred Astaire. No, we don’t actually see the high heels in this video, but based on the makeup I would not be surprised at all if he was wearing them, and he did lip-sync the entire song backwards, which is no mean feat.