NASA's Next Manned Mission to an Asteroid

Now that the Space Launch System program is officially on its tracks, lets take a look at what NASA plans to do with the giant rocket. After the first couple of test flights (including a manned fly-by around the moon somewhere between 2017 and 2021), the first big objective is to send 4 astronauts to a 6 month trip to a Near Earth Object (NEO). The mission would be called 'Plymouth Rock'.

NASA Officially Announces the Space Launch System

Last Wednesday NASA officials publicly unveiled the Space Launch System, the new heavy lift rocket that will send astronauts beyond earth orbit, to asteroids, the moon and possibly some day to Mars. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the design has been known for a few months now, but for various political reasons, the project hadn't been officially announced yet.

Kepler telescope finds planet Tatooine!

NASA engineers operating the Kepler Space telescope have announced this morning that they have discovered the first planet to orbit a twin-star system. The planet is a gas giant about the size of Jupiter, and its temperature is about -70 C, so it's not really habitable. What is important about this discovery is that it proves that planets can be formed on binary star systems. Before today, it had been speculated but never proven.

The newly discovered planet is officially designated as Kepler 16b, but NASA officials have proposed that it should be named Tatooine, after the twin-sun planet in Star-Wars, barring any licensing issues with Lucasfilm...

The Kepler 16 star system is about 200 light-years from earth.

[kepler.nasa.gov]

Trulia.com Crime Map

Trulia.com, the real estate web-site, has unveiled a new web site that shows a great interactive crime map for most US cities, including San Francisco. This is not the first online crime map out there, but this one has by far the best interface. It looks really good, is well designed, and it is very fast and responsive. You can zoom in from National level all the way to street level and get all kinds of detailed information about every single crime reported. You can also see trends by hour or day.

[Trulia.com/crime via gizmodo]

Battlefield 3 Trailer

Check out the amazing full lenght trailer for the upcoming first person shooter Battlefield 3. This is actual gameplay footage, the realism is impressive! You've got destructible environment, immersive sound effects, photo-realistic lighting and rendering. You hear all kinds of sounds, people talking, dogs barking, you see sun rays through the smoke and partial lighting on people, see the reflections of your surroundings on your scope, flags floating in the wind, tracer bullets and sparks flying, debris blown up in the air everywhere.

Endeavour's Last Flight

The Space Shuttle Endeavour launched for the last time this morning at 8:56am EDT, carrying 6 astronauts and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), as well as the new STORRM navigation and docking system to the International Space Station. This is the second-to-last flight of the Space Shuttle fleet, the last flight will be Atlantis' STS-135 mission, scheduled for July 12, 2011.

Ah, crap! We're running out of Neodymium, too...

We already knew that we were running out of oil, and in recent years experts have started to worry that we are running out of Uranium to power the world's Nuclear power plants. But now, new reports show that we are also running out of Neodymium and Dysprosium, two rare metals used in the manufacturing of the powerful permanent magnets found in electric car engines and wind turbines.