Obama Seeks $17.7 Billion to Lasso Asteroid, Explore Space

via mashable.com

NASA unveiled a $17.7 billion spending plan for 2014 today that continues major ongoing space exploration projects, while including funds to kick-start an audacious new mission to capture a small asteroid and park it near the moon so astronauts can explore it by 2025.

The proposed NASA budget is part of President Barack Obama's 2014 federal budget request and would restore the U.S. space agency's funding back near its 2013 levels. The request is about $50 million less than NASA's 2013 budget but would restore deep cuts from sequestration, leaving the agency with a roughly $1 billion increase from the $16.6 billion budget actually received for 2013.

NASA's plan to send a robotic spacecraft to lasso an asteroid and tow it to the moon is a stand-out item in the 2014 budget request. The goal is to capture an asteroid and bring it closer to Earth so that a manned mission can explore the space rock by 2025 — a major U.S. spaceflight goal set by Obama in 2010...

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NASA said to request $100 million for plan to capture near-Earth asteroid

via theverge.com

NASA is taking a plan to send an unmanned spacecraft to capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit around the Moon seriously. Aviation Week reports that NASA's budget request for fiscal 2014 will include $100 million to help fund the asteroid retrieval mission. A feasibility study looking into the project was prepared last April year by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and it proposed that capturing a 1.1-million pound, 7-meter wide asteroid using an automated spacecraft would cost $2.6 billion.

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NASA set to launch 13k square foot solar sail as early as next year

via techi.com

It’s the type of vision that spawns realities unimaginable to most, but it’s a vision that has come true in recent years and that will receive its biggest test as early as 2014, according to NASA. The sail utilizes the “currents” of the Sun’s energy to propel it through space much the same way that wind pushes a sail boat across the ocean. NASA’s project, nicknamed Sunjammer in honor of its conceptual genesis, will put a 13,000 square foot sail into space. It sounds big, but once collapsed it’s the size of a dishwasher and weighs 70 lbs.

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40 of the Best NASA Images

via digitaltrends.com

Forty years ago today, NASA snapped the iconic "Blue Marble" image of Earth. To celebrate the anniversary, rocket into our intergalactic compilation of 40 of NASA's best images.

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Watch a NASA Astronaut Describe the Complexities of Photography in Space

via gizmodo.com

Donald Pettit is, as well as being a NASA astronaut, an exceptionally keen photographer—which is why he has over 10 top-of-line DSLR cameras littering the International Space Station. In this video, he talks about the complexities, and joys, of photography in space.

Donald gets to grips with the fact that zero-g photography is inherently different to Earth-bound picture taking—even if NASA doesn't like it that way—as well as the artistic and environmental factors that affect the process. There is, of course, a reasonable amount to geekery in there, too, and he touches on using a modded Nikon D35 to capture IR images, as well as the technicalities of minimizing reflections when taking images through the space stations windows.

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NASA Starts Work on Real Life Star Trek Warp Drive

via gizmodo.com

"Perhaps a Star Trek experience within our lifetime is not such a remote possibility." These are the words of Dr. Harold "Sonny" White, the Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate. Dr. White and his colleagues don't just believe a real life warp drive is theoretically possible; they've already started the work to create one.

Yes. A real warp drive, Scotty.

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The Full Resolution Video of Curiosity Touching Down on Mars

via gizmodo.com

One of the biggest bummers about Mars Rover Curiosity's epic landing is that there was no news crew on the surface to catch footage of the descent. This full resolution video of Curiosity touching down from its own point of view is the next best thing.

This isn't the first video of touchdown, but it's the best. It's the result of stringing together all the high resolution shots the rover took on its way to the surface, high resolution shots that took a lot longer to get back to Earth than the initial thumbnails. If it seems a bit choppy, that's because Curiosity only took about four pictures per second. It might not be movie quality, but this is the best video out there of what it's like to land on Mars. Incredible.

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43 Years Ago Today, We Walked On The Moon

via techcrunch.com

As lovers of technology and slaves to the news cycle, we all get caught up in the next new thing. The cynic in me notes that the 43rd anniversary of the moon landing – an occurrence that changed the course of history with a completeness and intensity that few warmongers have ever been able to induce – is just another moon landing anniversary. It isn’t the 25th or the 50th or the 100th. It’s just something that happened 43 years ago today at about 8pm UTC. In short, two men – born helpless as the rest of us – through time, training, and sheer will, were thrust into space by the greatest minds of our generation and then stepped onto a lunar soil that the New York Times reported as being fine and powdery.

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NASA Envisions Alien Worlds Photos

via in.news.yahoo.com

For decades, NASA has delighted stargazers with pictures taken by astronauts, telescopes, and rovers across the galaxy -- photographic glimpses of real planets, moons, stars, and other heavenly bodies. When illustrators, meanwhile, stretch their imaginations -- giving shape and color to what, say, a sunrise on another world -- their work offers brilliant notions of what vistas beyond our tiny corner of space might look like. Captured by a camera or, as in this gallery, envisioned by artists, the far reaches of space continue to humble and amaze.

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Our Sun Like You Have Never Seen It Before

via gizmodo.com

This video takes SDO images and applies additional processing to enhance the structures visible. While there is no scientific value to this processing, it does result in a beautiful, new way of looking at the sun. The original frames are in the 171 Angstrom wavelength of extreme ultraviolet. This wavelength shows plasma in the solar atmosphere, called the corona, that is around 600,000 Kelvin. The loops represent plasma held in place by magnetic fields. They are concentrated in "active regions" where the magnetic fields are the strongest. These active regions usually appear in visible light as sunspots. The events in this video represent 24 hours of activity on September 25, 2011.

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NASA Astronauts Are Training for Missions to Asteroids

via gizmodo.com

The Moon? Boring. Mars? Meh. The next giant leap for mankind won't come in the form of an interplanetary trip, but rather a quest to the pile of rocks which weren't quite good enough to become planets. Yup, asteroids. And NASA's already started training for the trip.

The idea behind visiting an asteroid is that astronauts can explore the surface for minerals, and to gather knowledge about the oversized rocks should they ever end up en route to planet earth and need to be destroyed.

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NASA Captures the Sun's Most Striking Photo Yet

via gizmodo.com

You are looking at the Sun's Evil Eye. Or the Death Star ready to shoot its planet-destructing laser. Or Jean Grey turning into the Phoenix. Actually, I really don't care about what the hell is going on here—it just looks amazing.

And the fact is that, even while this M4.7-class solar flare ended before any coronal mass ejection happened, it doesn't make it look less scary. According to NASA, "this image is shown in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength that is typically colorized in teal and that provided the most detailed picture of this particular flare."

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A Comparison of NASA's Rockets and Spaceships Throughout History.

via americaspace.org

At first look, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) looks like the perfect rocket: heavy lifting launch vehicle that promises to be more versatile, powerful, and durable than anything that has preceded it. But there are major threats hanging over the rocket stacking the odds against it ever leaving the ground.

By design, SLS is pretty incredible. It’s central piece is a liquid fuelled core stage modelled off the space shuttle’s external tank. The core stage is flanked by two boosters that will enable early Block 1 and Block 1A versions of the rocket to lift 70 metric tons into Earth orbit. A small “kick” stage will give payloads on these smaller rockets the extra push for distant targets like the Moon. The later “evolved” SLS will feature a second stage that will facilitate lifting 130 metric tons into orbit. All three versions will be adaptable for manned spacecraft or cargo depending on the mission’s needs. As a point of reference, the evolved SLS will be as powerful as the Saturn V and less than 50 feet taller.

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NASA Timeline "Walking On Air" - Amazing show of Earth's Lights

via nasa.gov

This video features a series of time lapse sequences photographed by the Expedition 30 crew aboard the International Space Station. Set to the song “Walking in the Air,” by Howard Blake, the video takes viewers around the world, through auroras, and over dazzling lightning displays.

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NASA Made a Mindblowing 3D GIF of the Texas Tornadoes

via gizmodo.com

The Texas tornadoes were insanely powerful, tossing flatbed trucks around like toys and raining softball-sized hail. NASA turned the data from its TRMM weather satellite into a 3D model that shows the absurd scope and intensity of the storms.

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NASA says it was hacked 13 times last year

via reuters.com

NASA said hackers broke into its computer systems 13 times last year, stealing employee credentials and gaining access to mission-critical projects in breaches that could compromise U.S. national security.

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Breathtaking NASA Photos

via speckyboy.com

Unless you can afford a ticket to space ($200,000 with Virgin Galactic), the only way we will ever be able to clearly view our planet in its entirety or any distant galaxies is through the photographs released by NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space Agency). So, here are a few of my favorite pictures taken by NASA from its various space programs. You will find them breathtaking.

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NASA Propulsion Experiment Provides Data for More Efficient Jet Engines

via nasa.gov

Aeronautics researchers at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center recently completed flight tests of a unique experimental jet engine inlet design in the Channeled Center-body Inlet Experiment, or CCIE.

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NASA developing comet hunting space harpoon

via digitaltrends.com

NASA wants to spear itself a hunk of comet with a new ballista powered harpoon in development.

NASA wants to shoot for the stars, or at the very least, comets will do. Scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland are currently developing a space harpoon in order to siphon samples off of wayward comets.

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NASA probe at solar system's edge

via msnbc.msn.com

After more than 30 years of traveling through the cosmos, a far-flung NASA spacecraft has entered an uncharted region between our solar system and interstellar space, scientists announced Monday.

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