In a little under 12 hours as I write this post, one of the most exciting celestial missions will come to a dramatic climax. At 10:31pm PDT (6:31am in the UK) Mars Curiosity Rover will crash through the Martian atmosphere, in an event experts are dubbing "7 minutes of terror". You can watch the whole thing play out live on the mission website, where you can also follow the robots mission as it spends one Martian year on the planet's surface.
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of human space flight this year a documentary was published on Youtube, recreating Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight using cameras and astronauts on the ISS. Check out firstorbit.org for more information, or just sit back and watch the embedded movie here (it's going to be good for my traffic stats if you do!)
I’m not sure that the offered Android & iPhone smartphone apps bring enough to the party to make them worth paying for unless you want to share the film on the move, but I certainly don’t begrudge the documentary makers for trying to make a bit of money out of the venture either.
There is something so peaceful about gazing up into the heavens at night – but actually the sky is littered with excitement & intrigue – and this software package helps you to unravel the clues left by the Universe. Star gazers with a curiosity about the universe can download a free open source planetarium at stellarium.org. Available for windows, mac & several flavors of linux the planetarium shows the sky in real time from any location you specify. Don’t expect the landscape to be what’s outside your door – but there are a few styles to choose from. There’s so much to this package you’ll have to explore it on your own – just don’t get lost out there among the stars.
The search for extra-terrestrial life goes into overdrive with the launch of a new crowd source project, Seti Live, which asks netizens to classify radio frequency signals picked up by the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array. Collaborating on the project are citizen science experts, Zooniverse.
The Mars Curiosity, which took off from NASA’s launch pad in November 2011, is the biggest vehicle ever to attempt landing on anything other than earth. If you want to keep an eye on its progress it is tweeting as it travels, so make sure you follow @MarsCuriosity. And there are more details, including launch videos, technical information & a countdown timer to it's arrival on Mars available on the NASA mission website.
Couldn't resist posting this for the weekend... What do you do if you miss NASA's Space Shuttle programme to much it hurts? Make you're own out of Lego, of course!! This tribute was launched by Romanian, Raul Oaida, and reportedly reached reached an altitude of 35,000m.
Take a trip to the heavens, courtesy of Microsoft at Worldwidetelescope.org. There is a version that runs in the browser, which might be a little slow to load as it contains masses of data. Serious space cadets can download the desktop PC version. This interactive application puts a planetarium on your home PC, with a telescope you control as you zoom around the skies exploring famous landmarks (or should that be skymarks?), such as the Eagle Nebula, the Antenna Galaxies , and a little closer to home Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
