PopTech

Huffington Post has a great collection of space-walk photos.

There is a space plane in there.

Behind the scenes at the ISS! International Space Station Commander Sunita Williams gives a tour of the orbital laboratory in November, just before she returned to Earth. Floating through the different modules, Williams describes in great detail the sleep stations, exercise areas, the kitchen, bathrooms and the stunning views from the Cupola. — heidi

This is definitely the most rad thing you will watch today.

Mind-boggling. 100,00 Stars is an interactive visualization of the stellar neighborhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It includes real location data of over 100,000 nearby stars, including 87 major named stars and our solar system.

Try it.

7,603 plays • Download

This new short from Radiolab is all about an astronaut who relives a heart-pounding close call, and shares one of the most tranquil moments of his life.

200 miles above Earth’s surface, astronaut Dave Wolf — rocketing through the blackness of Earth’s shadow at 5 miles a second — floated out of the Mir Space Station on his very first spacewalk.

Also of interest: discovering what plays while you’re on hold with NASA.

What the Earth sounds like from Space by NASA

(via doinwork)

Tonight marks the world premiere of Ground Control: An Opera in Space, a staged concert inspired by mission control rooms performed live by the International Space Orchestra. “More than an experiment, it is a call to action to imagine possible future human relations to science, and to adapt science to our creative needs.”

(via Design Indaba)

What Did Playtex Have to Do With Neil Armstrong?

You are right that the processor does feel acient. Our current smarthphones are more powerful. The reasoning for this is three-fold. First of all, the computer was selected about 8 years ago, so we have the latest and greated space certified parts that existed then. Second of all, it was the most rubost and proven space grade processor at that time. Thirdly, in order to make a processor radiation hardened it requires lots of tricks on the silicon that is not conducive to making it fast. Given that, it does not run any GUIs and can just focus on raw programming, and actually gets a lot done. All of the programming is done in C, and our toolchain is very similar to programming on any platform.

— Jonny Grinblat aka “Pre-celebration Guy” and Avionics System Engineer for Mars Curiosity Rover responds to a Reddit IAmA question posed by davidhero who asks: “The processor you guys used feels ancient to me. How did you guys program on it? Is it only “CPU-instructions” or was there some higher level programming for it?”

(via the Mars Curiosity Rover IAmA)

wordbk:

spytap:

In honor of Curiosity’s successful landing, I present “Three Generations,” courtesy of John Klose , JPL employee since 2002. It shows the Mars landers Spirit (foreground), Opportunity (middle), and Curiosity (background) taken in front of JPL building 180, aka the Directors building.