NASA recently posted the “Rovers Eye View” video on its website gallery, explaining the Mars trek took the vehicle from Victoria crater to Endeavour crater between September, 2008, and August, 2011. In the course of the trip, 309 “horizon photographs” were captured and later edited together for the slide show. NASA adjusted audio data recorded by the rover so it could be heard and applied it to the video as a captivating soundtrack.

The Martian landscape is barren and appears to be mostly sandy with mountain ranges interspersed periodically on the horizon. Rocky outcroppings dot the landscape and provide an eerie contrast to the bleak scenes provided by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. The audio overlay sounds much like someone continuously crunching a bag of chips. The sound – which had to be sped up 1,000 times to be heard, according to NASA – becomes louder as the rover moves from sand onto bedrock. Although the video doesn’t give extensive footage of the Endeavor crater, it does show up on the horizon about half-way through the presentation.

Other than an occasional shadow, or mechanical arm, there is no sign of life visible in the video.

Even though prime missions for the Rover Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, ended on Mars in April, of 2004, both continued to provide “bonus, extended missions” for years to come. Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in 2010, according to a NASA statement, and Opportunity continues to work at the 14-mile-wide Endeavor crater. The Rovers each made discoveries during their drives that indicate ancient Mars may have supported microbial life, the statement said.

Opportunity has driven a total of just under 21 miles while on Mars and has far outlasted expectations.

“We have a very senior rover in good health for having already worked 30 times longer than planned,” John Callas, a project manager for Opportunity, said in a statement.”

NASA also has posted a collection of photographs taken by the rover Spirito during its travels on Mars. The imagery shows much of the same dusty terrain as that portrayed in the Opportunity video, but also intersperses some intriguing scenes including signs of water, dust devils sweeping across the Martian plains and a sunset at Gusev Crater.

A new rover, Curiosity, will be launched between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18 and is expected to arrive on Mars by August, 2012, according to NASA.

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J.P. McCawley writes full-time on varied topics ranging from current events to popular culture and technology, including innovative products like the Galaxy S, iPhone and other gadgets.

The LEGO Group has created special (and you bet that they’re special!) LEGO minifigs which are going to be the companions of the rocket Atlas V. This spacecraft is also going to carry a space probe named Juno. The destination? The fifth rock from the Sun: Jupiter. Wondering who the LEGO gods are? Take a look.

LEGO Gods

Here’s a closer look at each of the LEGO gods.

This one’s Jupiter – the connection being as obvious as the sun at noon. The King of the gods. The King of the sky and thunder, hence a lightning bolt in his hand. I love his beard the most! And in case you prefer Greek mythology, Jupiter is the counterpart of Zeus.

LEGO Jupiter

This one’s Jupiter’s sister/wife Juno. The Queen of the gods. The goddess of marriage. In her hand is a magnifying glass, which is supposed to stand for her search for truth. In Greek mythology, her counterpart is Hera.

LEGO Juno

Last, but not the least, is Galileo. Oh, wait! He is not a Roman god! Then again, if you think about it, he has god-like status anyway. And I am pretty sure that he’ll be right in his element with the two Roman gods as they embark on the five-year trip to Jupiter. I don’t need to tell you what he’s holding in his hands, do I?

LEGO Galileo

The space probe Juno will be leaving the Earth on Friday and will reach its destination in 2016. The LEGO gods are coming along for the ride upon the request of NASA scientists. Obviously, they love LEGO as much as the next person. The guys at LEGO loved the request so much that they decided to take on the project and to foot the bill as well. Five freaking thousand dollars ($5,000) for EACH of the LEGO gods. Why so expensive? Well they’re made of aluminum. The manufacturing process was also ultra special in order to meet the requirements of NASA.

I bet that if LEGO had made more than one unit of Jupiter, Juno, and Galileo, they would have collectors scrambling to get their hands on at least one minifig.

What with space tourism seemingly just around the corner, I think the brewers are simply exhibiting foresight. Now, drinking beer may be the last thing on the mind of a space tourist, but if you think about it, having a beer in space is the cherry on top.

Why not bring your favorite brew, you may ask. You see, drinking in space is not exactly the same as drinking in your favorite watering hole down on earth. For one, you get swelling tongues (eew!) and a less than normal sense of taste. Bearing those things in mind, the brewers came up with this one-of-a-kind beer that will make you feel right at home.

From the reactions of the people who tested the beer in zero gravity, it seems that Vostok 4 Pines Stout just might be the official beer of space tourism.

In case you have plans of going on an out of this world vacation in the future, and you have the chance to enjoy some beer at that time, you have Mitchell and Jason Held to thank for this brilliant idea. I have to say – these guys have got their priorities straightened out!

Believe it or not, their scheme actually worked! The guys behind the project – dubbed Operation PARIS (short for Paper Aircraft Released Into Space) – are Steve Daniels, John Oates, and Lester Haines, space enthusiasts all of them. This is no ordinary toy – they shelled out a total of 8,000 GBP to carry out the project. The airplane is made of paper straws and has a wingspan of 3 feet. They hooked it up to a helium balloon, which floated all the way up to 90,000 feet before it popped. (I didn’t know they could go up that high!) They also connected a camera on the plane so that we can all see the view from up there. See for yourself!

This is a pretty impressive feat – not only because it is the first endeavor of its kind, but also because the paper airplane actually made it back to earth in one piece! Who would have thought that something made out of paper can fall 90,000 feet with only a small hole in one of the wings? This is indeed proof of the skill of the guys who started the project just for some silly fun. Now they have gotten worldwide attention, and rumor has it that some Australian dudes are out to beat their feat. Anyone care to challenge them?

via Technabob

Australian artist Peter Hennessey came with the great idea to create live sized wooden sculptures of several spacecrafts such as The Hubble telescope and the Lunar Rover.

We never really get to see spacecrafts, it’s not as they can get the Mars Rover back and put it in a museum for people to see in real life. We experience space and spacecrafts entirely through photo’s and sometimes video.

That’s why Peter Hennessey decided to build spacecrafts sculptures.

By ‘re-enacting’ space traveling, scientific and military objects in plywood, galvanized steel and canvas, the artist creates ‘stand-ins’ that allow the viewer to contemplate their physical, symbolic and historical resonances as well as the political processes that they represent.

To build the Hubble telescope sculpture Peter used for the technical planning, only images and Adobe Illustrator, it took three months to build the telescope from laser cutting the parts to assembling them.

As a spacecraft noob I can’t really phantom how large actually spacecrafts are, it’s really hard to process it if I don’t see a human standing next to it to get come perspective. Things like saying the new Boeing airplane’s wing are “half a football field”(not that I now how many football fields a Boeing wing is) or other measurement like that don’t really say anything to me.

Being able to see Peter’s sculptures live would help a lot of people to get some perspective of how big actually these crafts and telescopes are. And to think all the technology inside the real thing must be 100% perfect because once send to space there is seldom an opportunity to go to it and fix it.

On Peter’s website you can see more photo’s from several other sculptures he has made.

Note: The Hubble telescope photo is copyrighted by designboom.

Most of us geeks are fans of the TV show The Big Bang Theory but until recently I could only tell you that the Big Bang was an explosion that created matter and existence. The details where beyond me.

One month ago the Large Hadron Collider in CERN collided particles for the first time to recreate the Big Bang, it was all over the news and yet most people where oblivious to what exactly was done at the CERN. I spend at least a couple of hours on Wikipedia reading up on the Bose Higson particle.

Now you can learn about the Big Bang with an illustrated and rhyming book, Bang! The Universe Verse, created by twenty-six year old James Lu Dunbar.

From the beginning of existence to the birth of galaxies, you’ll learn how matter was created, why stars shine and where we fit in this wild and crazy universe.

This comic book is for all ages and very suitable for teaching kids about the Big Bang. I read it myself and while I still don’t get everything about protons, neutrons, etc. I know a lot more then before I read the comic book. You’ll have a better understanding of what the Big Bang really is, even though you learned it at school, most of us have forgotten what we learned.

The illustration is about an old couple of which the male looks a bit like Albert Einstein. Together they show you the creation of universe while explaining it in rhyme verses.

Well if they explained this to me like this when I was a kid I think chances are very high I would remember it today. Heck I think if everything science was taught like this if you are a kid it is bound to stay with you.

According to the author it will be a four part comic book with this one being the first part naturally. You can read the book online for free or buy a paperback version for 12,95 dollars.

Galactus needs to take better care of himself. I didn’t even know he was a smoker.

In reality, Hubble captured this spectacular image of a “three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust” that’s under attack from within and without. Infant stars inside are firing off jets of gas, while bigger stars outside the pillar are gobbling it up with their super-bright light. I guess you could call it a big ol’ pocket of star fuel.

Hubble released the image to celebrate its 20th anniversary, and you can bet your warp drive it’s been composited and enhanced out the wazoo. But that doesn’t make it any less amazing (see higher-res versions here). It’s located in the Carina Nebula, which of course you can find in the constellation Carina, at about 7,500 light years away.

For something closer to home, but equally eye-popping, NASA recently brought the SDO — that’s “Solar Dynamics Observatory” — online, after launching this bad boy back in February. Its mission is to study the “space weather” created by the sun, and it’s already turned in some incredible visuals of the star we orbit, using the full spectrum that modern technology provides. Take a look at the image below, that shows details of the sun never seen before, using false-color and compositing.

The SDO also captured this video of a solar flare that’s guaranteed to blow your mind.

The only thing more impressive than this jaw-dropping image is the fact that it’s real. It’s not a painting or a computer-generated image. It’s the real deal, and it shows something that really exists, a mere 50 million light years from Earth.

So what is it?

We’re all thinking the same thing, right? Behold the open mouth of Galactus!!

But no. In reality, it’s something a little less tabloid, but every bit as awe-inspiring. You are looking at what NASA describes as a “rapidly growing supermassive black hole” located in the nearby galaxy NGC 1068. (Seriously, scientific community, can’t we come up with cooler names?) This bad boy is twice the size of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and it’s chewing up matter and belching gas into the surrounding space at a speed of one million miles an hour.

The most incredible thing about the photo is how it was made. It’s actually a composite of multiple images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The latter X-ray data is shown in red, visual data from Hubble is in green, and radio data from VLA is in blue. I can’t remember ever seeing a real-life black hole before.

The Chandra scientists responsible for studying the black hole believe that it’s making such profound changes to NGC 1068, that it’s altering the evolution of that galaxy.

So what happens after it chews up its own galaxy? You never can eat just one, you know. We better start building spaceships en masse and getting the heck out of this thing’s way, pronto.

Each arc is another five light years from Earth, so while most ETs have watched the first baseball game, and Alderbaran is about to witness World War II, it’s going to be a long time before Friends, Babylon 5, The Sopranos and Spongebob Squarepants make it out there.

Created by boffins in Tokyo, J-Ware “stink-free” underwear is being tested by Koichi Wakata, currently orbiting the earth on the International Space Station.

“He can wear his trunks more than a week. The other astronauts become very sweaty, but he doesn’t have any sweat. He didn’t need to hang his clothes to dry,” reports an official with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.

How?

This versatile undergarment can kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body, and it dries quickly too.

Unfortunately, this miracle clothing looks as if it’ll be confined to space explorers. The rest of us will just have to (continue to) endure daily clothes changing, laundry and personal hygiene.

Could go nicely with this Aircool suit.

(Via Weird Asia News)