Awesomeness Round-Up – 6/21/11
- By Faith Tucker
- June 21, 2011
- 3 Comments
As Maggie mentioned in her intriguing post last week, things have been quite busy around here recently. So here is a bit of a catch-up edition of your weekly Awesomeness Round-Up. Enjoy! Historically, astronomy has always required a great deal of patience as astronomers spent long, cold nights at the … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 5/16/11
- By Maggie Masetti
- May 16, 2011
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Want to see NASA Goddard in 3D? Get out your glasses and check out this really cool YouTube video showing the Center and some of the work that goes on here.
Try It At Home: Build your own satellite (paper model)!
- By Maggie Masetti
- March 18, 2011
- 4 Comments
One of the things we do a lot of at NASA Goddard is build satellites. Many, many missions have come through here to be either constructed, or tested, or both! But did you know that you can build your own versions of many of these missions? Ok, maybe they won’t … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 11/22/10
- By Maggie Masetti
- November 22, 2010
- 2 Comments
The Chandra X-ray satellite just found the youngest nearby black hole. At 30 years old, it’s the remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth. “If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example where the birth of a black … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 11/16/10
- By Maggie Masetti
- November 16, 2010
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This recently released image is basically a map of dark matter. It shows the distribution of the dark matter in the center of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 1689, which contains an amazing number of galaxies (about 1000) and trillions (!) of stars. Abell 1689 is 2.2 billion light-years from … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 11/8/10
- By Sara Mitchell
- November 8, 2010
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This past week marked a major milestone in mankind’s exploration and understanding of comets – the EPOXI mission flew just 700 km from the nucleus of comet Hartley 2 and snapped some amazing images! This close pass will give researchers incredible new insight into the structure of comets. As we … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 10/18/10
- By Sara Mitchell
- October 18, 2010
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This week’s round-up will be a quick one – we just got back from attending the Blogworld & New Media Expo, and our brains are exploding with ideas for new things to do for Blueshift! But plenty of news-worthy things happened while we were gone, because astronomical discoveries wait for … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 8/16/10
- By Sara Mitchell
- August 16, 2010
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Last week, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team announced that they had spotted something that had never been seen before – gamma rays coming from a nova. Back in March, Japanese amateur astronomers saw a dramatic change in a star in Cygnus and informed the professional astronomy community. Swift took … Continue Reading →
Podcast: The Music of Science
- By Maggie Masetti
- November 30, 2009
- 2 Comments
Click to listen! (6.7MB MP3, right-click to save) Transcript (Text, PDF) The evening of November 2, 2009 was the world premiere of “Cosmic Reflection,” an orchestral composition inspired by one of NASA’s satellites, in Washington, DC. This opus began as a simple prelude inspired by (and performed by a brass … Continue Reading →
Podcast: Astronomical Data’s Long Road Home
- By Sara Mitchell
- June 30, 2009
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Click to listen! (7MB MP3, right-click to save) Transcript (Text, PDF) It’s easy to think of a satellite as a fancy digital camera – just point, shoot, and look at the pretty picture that emerges. But it’s not that simple. Astronomical data has a far longer journey to make it … Continue Reading →
