Rover video looks down on Mars during landing - Technology & science - Space PASADENA, Calif. — NASA on Monday unveiled a low-resolution, color video from its Curiosity rover that shows what travelers could see if they were riding along for the last couple of minutes of the craft's descent to Mars. The recording begins with the protective heat shield falling away, and ends with dust being kicked up as the rover is lowered by cables inside an ancient crater. Curiosity was successfully deposited on the floor of Gale Crater on Sunday night, using a sky-crane procedure that had never been tried before in a space mission. Since then, the rover has returned a flood of pictures, including black-and-white views of the 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain it's heading for. Still more pictures will be on the way, including a panorama of Curiosity's surroundings and a higher-resolution version of the video from Curiosity's Mars Descent Imager, also known as MARDI. The MARDI camera is mounted on the rover's chassis, looking down toward the ground. Wow! More about Mars:
ISS Countdown to launch of ESA’s billion-star surveyor / Gaia / Space Science Gaia sunshield deployment time lapse sequence Countdown to launch of ESA’s billion-star surveyor 21 October 2013 ESA’s billion-star surveyor Gaia will be launched from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou on 20 November to begin a five-year mission to map the stars with unprecedented precision. Gaia’s main goal is to create a highly accurate 3D map of our Milky Way Galaxy by repeatedly observing a billion stars to determine their positions in space and their movement through it. Other measurements will assess the vital physical properties of each star, including temperature, luminosity and composition. Gaia will map the stars from an orbit around the Sun, near a location some 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit known as the L2 Lagrangian point. Gaia mapping the stars of the Milky Way The spacecraft will spin slowly, sweeping its two telescopes across the entire sky and focusing their light simultaneously onto a single digital camera, the largest ever flown in space – it has nearly a billion pixels.
להיות מדען עם פרופסור דן CURIOSITY – Explosion de joie chez les ingénieurs de la NASA A 7 h 31, heure de Paris, le robot Curiosity se pose avec succès sur Mars. Un exploit technologique et humain qui provoque une explosion de joie dans la mission de contrôle à Pasadena, en Californie, où les ingénieurs de la NASA ont tout suivi de très près. Avant le moment-clé, la tension était palpable. Doug McCuistion, directeur de programme d'exploration de Mars à la NASA, résumait la situation à quelques minutes du moment-clé : "Si nous réussissons, ce sera l'un des plus grands exploits dans l'histoire de l'exploration spatiale." Signaler ce contenu comme inapproprié Cette entrée a été publiée dans Actualité.
Make a Star Finder Make a Star Finder Make a Star Finder. Learn your way around the night sky by finding some of the constellations. Color or decorate the Star Finder, if you like. Fold it like this: Play the Star Finder game: Stick your thumbs and first two fingers into the four pockets on the bottom of the Star Finder. Then, ask the person to look inside the Star Finder and pick one of the four visible constellations. What ARE Constellations Anyway? A constellation is group of stars like a dot-to-dot puzzle. Other than making a pattern in Earth's sky, these stars may not be related at all. Even the closest star is almost unimaginably far away. Finding the Constellations We see different views of the Universe from where we live as Earth makes its yearly trip around the solar system. The Star Finder charts are for a latitude of 34° N, which is about as far north of the equator as Los Angeles, California. The star charts are maps of the sky overhead.
Planck on course for safe retirement / Operations Planck on course for safe retirement Mapping the cosmic microwave background 21 October 2013 In preparation for its final switch-off on 23 October, mission controllers today fired Planck’s thrusters to empty its fuel tanks. The satellite, which mapped the relic radiation from the Big Bang – the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB – in unprecedented detail, will be switched off in two days. One of Planck’s two instruments, the HFI high-frequency instrument, exhausted its liquid helium supply in January 2012. Since January 2012, the spacecraft has conducted three more sky surveys with LFI, enabling scientists to refine their CMB data. Permanent safe disposal “In the past weeks, we’ve been working to prepare Planck for permanent safe disposal,” says ESA’s Steve Foley, Spacecraft Operations Manager at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. Andreas Rudolph during Planck launch 2009 Complex procedures 1.5 million kilometres away Final command sent by ‘volunteer’
Sparking Joy in the Classroom with Student-Formulated Questions | Teaching Channel Editor's Note: This is the first of seven blogs from our friends at the Right Question Institue (RQI), a nonprofit educational organization. RQI makes it possible for all people to learn to ask better questions and participate more effectively in key decisions. Their free, easy to use resources have techniques for formulating and asking questions that will engage your students and increase their curiosity. Imagine starting your first unit of the year not with what students know, but with what they wonder. What would your students ask? In classrooms across the country and in different corners of the world, teachers are finding ways to drive learning with questions like these, asked by real-life students: What would happen to the tides if we woke up one morning and the moon disappeared? What would teaching and learning look like if every student in class was asking questions like these? Take a Look at QFT in Action QFT in Action from RightQuestion on Vimeo. The Right Question Institute
Curiosity : atterrissage sur Mars en HD (Vidéo) 29 jours de travail. C’est le temps qu’il aura fallu à Bard Canning, un amateur américain, pour mettre bout à bout les images prises par la sonde Curiosity lors de son atterrissage sur Mars, le 6 août dernier. Et le résultat est époustouflant ! Lors de sa descente en parachute, Curiosity a pris une série de photos dirigées vers le bas. Bard Canning a en effet travaillé manuellement chaque image, pour parvenir à reconstruire une vidéo parfaitement fluide à 30 images par secondes, en haute définition. il a même ajouté des sons et des bruits, de sorte que l’on a vraiment l’impression d’être un explorateur martien accompagnant Curiosity vers sa destinée. La vidéo est en temps réel. Source trouver:
La vie des astronautes dans l'espace Vous êtes fasciné par l'espace, le monde des astronautes et de la découverte spatiale ! Surtout quand il s'agit d'entraînement physique pour partir en expédition spatiale ! Comment font-ils pour supporter de tels entraînements ? Quels sont les secrets scientifiques des astronautes ? Pour répondre à toutes vos questions, E=M6 vous dévoile son reportage. Pour éviter d’avoir le mal de l’espace en orbite, les astronautes effectuent sur terre des entraînements quotidiens intensifs. Mots clefs : apesanteur espace astronaute fusée entraînement