Awesomeness Round-up – 10/25/10
- By Maggie Masetti
- October 25, 2010
- Comments Off on Awesomeness Round-up – 10/25/10
There’s been a trend lately to have webcams or live streams in some of NASA’s cleanrooms so that you guys can see flight hardware being built and tested.
And every once in a while, something unexpected happens! (At about 10 seconds in, in this case…)
You can see a new Mars rover, named Curiosity (and due to launch in 2012) being built on a live stream. Sometimes there are chats too!
You can see live shots from a webcam in Goddard’s large cleanroom where they are building and testing hardware for the James Webb Space Telescope.
If you want to know what goes into getting a satellite built (before it actually gets into a cleanroom, check out this cute video:
We have a new entrant in the “most distant thing we’ve seen in the Universe” contest. It’s a galaxy called UDFy-38135539 and it’s 13.1 billion light years away from us!
It was spotted in Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field. Thanks to Phil Plait for the labeled graphics.
The previous winner was a galaxy 12.8 billion light years away – so this is indeed much much further. We should note that there maybe have been a gamma-ray burst that may have been further away than UDFy-38135539, but that was a brief event. There are other galaxies that are probably further away, but their distances are unconfirmed at this point. We expect that we will continue to see these super distant objects as we progress in technology. That’s one reason we’re excited about the Webb telescope – right now we can see what are essentially “toddler” galaxies. But Webb hopes to see galaxies that are even earlier in the timeline of our Universe than that – in effect, baby pictures.
Phil Plait has a nice blog on this new discovery, so be sure to check that out for more information.
Here’s a photo of the man our NASA Center was named after, Robert Goddard:
Last week marks the anniversary of the date in 1899 when he wondered if you could fly to Mars in a vehicle without wings. Of course, Goddard would become a pioneer in rocketry. Geeked on Goddard has a blog entry and a podcast about this momentous day in Goddard’s history. (The man, that is.)
Here’s a video of a rocket launch that carried the Suzaku X-ray satellite into space!
This image was just released – a Hubble shot of NGC 3982, a galaxy chock full of starbirth:
The Solar Dynamics Observatory witnessed its first lunar transit on October 7th. It’s pretty AND it has scientific significance.
Here’s a movie:
We just posted about movie and TV science and what we like (or don’t like) about it because we were inspired by the Dr. David Saltzberg’s Big Blog Theory science blog. We also found this really interesting question and answer with him about science and TV.
