Almost three years ago, NASA officially announced the Space Launch System (SLS) project for the next manned space missions, even beyond the Moon. The first test launch is scheduled for the end of 2017 but according to a report by GAO (Government Accountability Office), a U.S. Congressional investigation section dedicated to auditing, the budget for this project isn’t enough to keep that deadline.
Two years ago, the Earth was almost hit by a solar superstorm, technically called coronal mass ejection. It’s been studied by a team led by Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado that included scientists from NASA and other universities. Their conclusion is that if this solar storm had hit the Earth we would still picking up the pieces.
The novel “The Art of Destruction” by Stephen Cole was published for the first time in 2006.
The TARDIS brings the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler to Chad in 2118, near a volcano. There, a agricultural team that is a bit pecualiar is trying to develop a fungus that can grow in the dark caves of the area feeding off anything that can be found there and at the same time has a high nutritional value.
The Doctor has detected alien signals in the area, where apparently only human activities are in place. Things change when one of the agriculture team members is infected with a substance that turns him into a kind of golem. The events become more and more chaotic and the Doctor must figure out what’s behind it before the danger extends well beyond the area.
NASA has opened a section of their site devoted to 3D resources. These are models of spaceships, asteroids and various topographic models available in STL format, one of the main formats used in the field of 3D printing. Other models are in various formats such as 3DS, which is used in 3D modeling byt the program Autodesk 3ds Max, or MB, used by Autodesk Maya. It’s a resource just opened and for that reason referred to as Beta, but the plan is to add new models over time.
Yesterday at Kennedy Space Center among the many celebrations for the 45th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon, there was a ceremony that honored Neil Armstrong renaming after him a historic building in the Center so far known as the Operations and Checkout Building. It was there that Armstrong and the other astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission got ready for launch.
