Awesomeness Round-up – 12/13/10
- By Sara Mitchell
- December 13, 2010
- 1 Comment
Credit: Photo by Drew Noel One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s many feats of engineering will be its actuators – tiny mechanical motors on the back of its primary and secondary mirror segments that will help the telescope focus by changing the mirrors’ curvature. You can’t see the actuator … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 12/6/10
- By Sara Mitchell
- December 6, 2010
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Image credit: NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using Landsat data provided bythe University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility. The biggest NASA news this week was the astrobiology press conference that had people buzzing about what the new discovery could be. The press release, when it was finally announced … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 11/29/10
- By Maggie Masetti
- November 29, 2010
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Two colliding spiral galaxies triggered a burst of star formation called a “starburst” (not like the candy). This one is the brightest ever seen away from the center of a galaxy merger. This image of these two galaxies (which are collectively known as II Zw 096) is a combination of … 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 – 10/25/10
- By Maggie Masetti
- October 25, 2010
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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 … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 8/23/10
- By Maggie Masetti
- August 23, 2010
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Do we have any science fiction fans out there? It seems like solar sails are a mainstay of spaceships in many books and movies (Avatar had a cool-looking ship with one). Are we one step closer to making this a reality? Meet NanoSail-D, which was designed and built by NASA. … Continue Reading →
Awesomeness Round-up – 8/9/10
- By Sara Mitchell
- August 9, 2010
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Our big news this past week? Webb Gotchu! But if you’ve seen our coverage, and the other behind-the-scenes coverage at Geeked on Goddard… how about Bad Astronomy’s coverage of our coverage? Or perhaps the Oakland Skepticism Examiner’s coverage of Phil’s coverage of our coverage? Whew. I guess it would be … Continue Reading →
SDO is GO!
- By Sara Mitchell
- February 19, 2010
- 2 Comments
February always seems to be a busy month – it’s a few days shorter than the rest and jam-packed with things to do. This one is no exception. NASA Goddard got blanketed with quite a few feet of snow in a series of storms, making the roads impassible for a … Continue Reading →
Podcast: The C.O.L.B.E.R.T. Episode
- By Sara Mitchell
- May 18, 2009
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Click to listen! (9MB MP3, right-click to save) Transcript (Text, PDF) NASA is famous for its acronyms and technical jargon. If you’ve ever watched a rocket launch or a spacewalk, you’ve heard some of them. Blueshift is produced by the ASD EPO team at NASA GSFC – that is, the Astrophysics Science … Continue Reading →
