Hot on the heels of two previous posts on launching the space shuttle, as well as Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit around there earth, spacecraftfilms.com now gives us this ultra slow motion view of Apollo 11 lifting off the launchpad on its Saturn V rocket. An incredible amount of power – just watch the ablative paint layers burn completely off of all the launch pad structures, under the intense heat of 5 rocket engines.
In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit around the earth, documentarian Christopher Riley gives us this film: First Orbit.
A real time recreation of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first orbit, shot entirely in space from on board the International Space Station. The film combines this new footage with Gagarin’s original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard.
Today, in commemoration of the Space Shuttle, NASA published this interesting infographic, and launched an interactive Space Shuttle site.
Since 1981, NASA space shuttles have been rocketing from the Florida coast into Earth orbit. The five orbiters — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — have flown more than 130 times, carrying over 350 people into space and travelling more than half a billion miles, more than enough to reach Jupiter. Designed to return to Earth and land like a giant glider, the shuttle was the world’s first reusable space vehicle. More than all of that, though, the shuttle program expanded the limits of human achievement and broadened our understanding of our world.
This past weekend I stumbled upon a test tube of cherry red Brooklyn Honey. Last fall, there was a major issue that developed with bees in Brooklyn, where the bees were getting into red syrup supplies at a local Marachino Cherry factory, and brining the chemicals back to their hives, turning their honey red.
Ascent – Commemorating Shuttle is a new video from the NASA Glenn Research Center, and shows off incredible, slow motion footage from launching the Space Shuttle. This is possibly the most interesting collection of launch footage I’ve seen yet. Most of the footage is captured from “engineering cameras”, which site at strategic points on and around the launch pad, to capture extremely detailed, high framerate, high resolution footage of every aspect of launch. Usually, this footage is simply used to inspect for any launch issues, but in this video it’s used by Matt Melis to explain every detail of launch, in stunning slow motion.
Coolest video/cg I’ve seen this week. With a combination of science and 3d Animation, Scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory made this nifty movie which brings to life complex magnetic fields. Take a look and read the back story.
Finally, make sure to turn the sound up. In addition to the trippy visuals, the crackle and pop of the animations is worth a listen, and consideration of minimalist sound design. (as is Cloverfield – a whole other blog post in the works…)
Two interesting pieces of “News from the Moon” lately.
First, European Space Agency scientists, at a conference in Strasbourg last week, discussed the possibilities of building a “Lunar Doomsday Ark” on the moon. The concept is to have a repository of all the necessary information needed to rebuild civilization on earth, should a catastrophic event ever happen. Something like another asteroid hitting, Skynet going online, or mass viral outbreak. The ark would house data banks of information and a self sustaining broadcast faculty. The broadcast faculty would continuously broadcast the ark’s information back to earth. If anything happens, surviving humans could find one of the fortified receiving stations, and start rebuilding civilization. Sounds like a plan to me.
Second, the Bad Astronomy Blog is reporting that the Mythbusters are doing a special episode on the Apollo landing myths – figuring out if we actually really did land on the moon, and checking out all those “mysterious angles and shadows” in the pics. I’m interested to see how they tear apart the skeptics claims on this one.
Speaking of which – I just uncovered this from the archives – the cuff checklist (pdf download)the Apollo 12 astronauts wore during their moon walks. The booklet contained all the timings and procedures for their time on the moon, as well as a few “bonuses”, slipped in secretly at the last moment. Nobody knew the surprises until those pages were flipped to while walking around out on the Moon.
Darn, not this time. Just when I thought we were making some progress with the SETI@home project, it comes out that the whole story of SETI finding a valuable signal was just twisted around by some reporter.
Here’s how it went down: Dan Wertheimer, an astronomer, told a reporter from KTVU that he may have heard a pulse from space. Not that he did, but that he may have. The reporter then took that tidbit, and a bunch of other loosely related information and spun it way out, ultimately publishing a story (now corrected) that made it seem like we had found and alien civilization.
Unfortunaely we didn’t, but it did renew my interest and hopes of the SETI@home project. I’ve been an active member of SETI@home since before college, and have given as much of my processing power over to the project as possible. Although I, (or anyone else) haven’t found anything yet, its still really cool to be a part of this project. Cool to be part of a mission that may be mankind’s only chance of salvation.
Anyway, I’ll keep my computer crunching radio recordings from space, and hopefully someday I’ll be able to write a much more exciting blog post…
Second, the Bad Astronomy Blog is reporting that the Mythbusters are doing a special episode on the Apollo landing myths – figuring out if we actually really did land on the moon, and checking out all those “mysterious angles and shadows” in the pics. I’m interested to see how they tear apart the skeptics claims on this one.