A team of research scientists recently conducted a series of simulations to see how the Orion Launch Abort System would fair in high speed conditions.
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Category: space – Page 970
The Making of ‘Pillars of Creation,’ One of the Most Amazing Images of Our Universe
Pretty Scientific is a new Gizmodo series where we explore how the best images in science were created and why.
Three pillars of gas and dust sit among stars like towers of billowing smoke. It would take several years for light to cross from the top to the bottom of these dusty columns. This striking image from the Hubble Space Telescope remains, to this day, one of the most well-known astronomical images ever taken.
But if you were to peer at the Pillars of Creation, part of the Eagle Nebula, through your own telescope, you wouldn’t see the same thing. The images you typically see of outer space are colorized and processed in order to bring out the detail and highlight the most relevant parts for scientific study. The popularity of the Pillars of Creation may have forever changed how astronomers present images of space to the public.
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Orion Span says it’ll put space hotel in orbit by 2022, but some details are up in the air
The plan to launch the module into space, and take reservations from customers for multimillion-dollar trips, was announced today at the Space 2.0 Summit in San Jose, Calif.
Orion Span says its hotel habitat, dubbed Aurora Station, will be about the size of a large private jet’s cabin, with 5,650 cubic feet of pressurized space. It’ll accommodate up to six residents at a time, including two professional crew members.
The flight plan calls for the module to be launched into a 200-mile-high orbit in late 2021, and host its first guests in 2022.
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There’s a Detectable Human-Made Barrier Surrounding Earth
We are changing space itself.
In 2017, NASA space probes detected a massive, human-made ‘barrier’ surrounding Earth.
And tests have confirmed that it’s actually having an effect on space weather far beyond our planet’s atmosphere.
That means we’re not just changing Earth so severely, scientists are calling for a whole new geological epoch to be named after us — our activities have been changing space too.
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This “Ancient Cold Front” in the Perseus Galaxy Shows an Ominous Winter
New research from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the Perseus galaxy cluster is experiencing a 5 billion-year-old cold front that has plummeted through the region at speeds of 300,000 miles per hour. It stretches about 2 million light-years across, and has remained very well-defined.
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What the Spinning Chair at Space Camp is Actually For
If you’re of a certain age, you probably know know Huntsville, Alabama’s Space Camp best as a prize for winning a ridiculous competition show. And if you ever obsessed over going on that cosmic retreat, you probably wanted to get on that weird spinning chair they always showed in the clips. It’s a serious looking device at a serious facility–what the heck is it for?
I was recently lucky enough to make a childhood dream come true and zipped up my flight suit for a shot at Space Camp. There, as I explain in the video above, I learned that the spinning chair has a more formal name: the Multi Axis Trainer, or MAT. It’s used to give riders a feeling of what it’s like to uncontrollably tumble through space.
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Press Room
NASA has selected 24 new Fellows for its prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP). The program enables outstanding postdoctoral scientists to pursue independent research in any area of NASA Astrophysics, using theory, observation, experimentation, or instrument development. Each fellowship provides the awardee up to three years of support.
The new NHFP preserves the legacy of NASA’s previous postdoctoral fellowship programs, the Hubble, Einstein and Sagan Fellowships. Once selected, fellows are named to one of three sub-categories corresponding to three broad scientific questions NASA has sought to answer about the universe:
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