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. The sequences are as follows: :01 – Stars over southern United States :08 – US west coast to Canada :21 – Central Europe to the Middle East :36 – Aurora Australis over the Indian Ocean :54 – Storms over Africa 1:08 – Central United States 1:20 – Midwest United States 1:33 – United Kingdom to Baltic Sea 1:46 – Moonset 1:55 – Northern United States to Eastern Canada 2:12 – Aurora Australis over the Indian Ocean 2:32 – Comet Lovejoy 2:53 – Aurora Borealis over Hudson Bay 3:06 – United Kingdom to Central Europe http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?collection_id=14483&media_id=141042671&module=homepage
Archive for April, 2012
DARPA is planning to announce a new Grand Challenge for a teleoperated humanoid robot.
The specific tasks are:
1) The robot will maneuver to a open frame utility vehicle, such as a John Deere Gator or a Polaris Ranger. The robot is to get into the driver’s seat and drive it to a specified location.
2) The robot is to get out of the vehicle, maneuver to a locked door, unlock it with a key, open the door, and go inside.
3) The robot will traverse a 100 meter, rubble strewn hallway.
4) At the end of the hallway, the robot will climb an ladder.
5) The robot will locate a pipe that is leaking a yellow-colored gas (non-toxic, non-corrosive). The robot will then identify a valve that will seal the pipe and actuate that valve, sealing the pipe.
6) The robot will locate a broken pump and replace it.
More than a thousand known asteroids are classed as “potentially hazardous,” based on size and trajectory, says astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson in Wired Science. Currently, it looks doable to develop an early-warning and defense system that could protect the human species from impactors larger than a kilometer wide. … Smaller ones, which reflect much less light and are therefore much harder to detect at great distances, carry enough energy to incinerate entire nations, but they don’t put the human species at risk of extinction. One killer asteroid we’ve been monitoring is Apophis, which could hit Earth in 2036, likely slamming into the Pacific Ocean. The tsunami it creates will devastate all the coastlines of the Pacific Rim. The gravitational tractor is a favorite solution. This involves parking a probe in space near the killer asteroid. As their mutual gravity draws the probe to the asteroid, an array of retro rockets fires, instead causing the asteroid to draw toward the probe and off its collision course with Earth. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/author/neil-degrasse-tyson/
