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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The Quest to Upgrade the Internet

via theotherchris.com

America was settled by corporations. Popular myth focuses on the pilgrims: Puritans who came to the new land seeking to escape persecution and establish a colony under their own religious ideas, but these people were not the first nor were they the largest or most successful European group to settle in America. Corporations were. They came because there was potential for great wealth in settling a “new” land. They were incorporated because the risk was great.

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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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Google's grand vision: what the Motorola deal means for Android

via telegraph.co.uk

As Google is given clearance in the US and Europe to buy Motorola Mobility, Matt Warman looks at how the purchase could give Google a new platform in the home.

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After 520 days in isolation, space researchers emerge from Mars 'mission'

via theglobeandmail.com

Pale but smiling, an international crew of researchers on Friday walked out of a set of windowless modules after a gruelling 520-day simulation of a flight to Mars.

The all-male crew of three Russians, a Frenchman, an Italian-Colombian and a Chinese slowly emerged from the western Moscow facility, which simulated the confinement, stress and fatigue of interplanetary travel — minus the weightlessness. Dressed in blue track suits emblazoned with the mission emblem, they carefully walked down a metal ladder to a greeting crowd of officials and journalists.

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