Posted 10/09/09 at 09:06:48 PM by Ryan Whitwam

NASA just crashed two probes into the moon. Don’t worry though, they totally meant to do it. The two probes were slammed into the lunar surface at over 5000 miles per hour in order to throw up a plume of debris that could be analyzed for signs of water ice. Those non-science types watching online were hoping for a visible plume of dust from the impacts. They were disappointed.

The expected 6-mile plume of debris didn’t materialize, but according to NASA scientists it went just fine on their end. LCROSS principal investigator Tony Colaprete said, “I saw variations in the spectra. I'm thrilled—that's a very good sign. The spectra is where the science is."

The Centaur probe hit the surface first, while being monitored by the LCROSS probe. The LCROSS then took the plunge itself. The area of impact was selected because the craters near the South Pole are never completely illuminated by the sun, meaning ice could be present. Colaprete said in the press conference, “If there's water there, or anything else interesting, we'll find it."

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Posted 07/10/09 at 07:00:53 PM by Paul Lilly

The rocket scientists at NASA hope to have a communications network ready by 2011 capable of efficiently transferring data between Earth and various probes, rovers, and spacecraft whizzing around the solar system, Discovery News reports. As it turns out, creating an interplanetary Internet is no easy task, even for the brainiacs at NASA.

"The communication delays are huge, and they are variable, because the planets are in orbit around the sun," says Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet's TCP/IP protocol.

On the International Space Station, NASA has been performing tests of network technologies called Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocols. Computer scientists -- including Vint Cerf -- began working on DTN as far back as 1998 as a way to overcome issues in networks that lack continuous network connectivity. Whereas it takes just milliseconds for packets to go from source to destination on Earth, those same packets take at least 8 minutes when traveling from Earth to Mars. Not only that, but packets have to contend with constant motion of celestial bodies.

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Posted 03/25/09 at 04:39:53 PM by Andy Salisbury

While Google continues to pull ahead with a healthy share of planetary images, Microsoft announced this week that they signed a deal that gives them access to 100TB worth of NASA’s images, that will ultimately find their way onto the WorldWide Telescope website.

Microsoft has announced that they plan on working with NASA in order to develop “the technology and infrastructure necessary to make the most interesting NASA content.” The content, which will be available on Microsoft’s virtual telescope for exploring the universe, WorldWide Telescope, should be available later this year.

And, for those keeping tabs on just how big 100TB of data is, that’s enough to fill 20,000 DVDs.

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Posted 01/16/09 at 12:36:43 AM by Nathan Grayson

Ultima creator and one-time Tabula Rasa big man Richard “Lord British” Garriott may have moonwalked right out of the gaming industry, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be phoning home after his geosynchronous jaunt. In an interview with GameDaily, Garriott spoke of his intention to give game development another shot – but only after raising the bar for mid-life crises a few notches higher.

“Do I have a plan that I can tell you now? No. I'm still finishing my space flight. I am literally still in the middle of NASA and ESA medical experiments. I am literally still in the middle of my earth observation analysis, as well as the particle crystal growth stuff we're wrapping up. And that's going to take me some weeks and months to wrap up,” Garriott said.

“But, some day in the future, it's hard not to assume I will get back into gaming. I still personally believe I have lots of great ideas and desire to build games. It's just today, it's space.”

Garriott also mentioned that he might be interested in developing a new Ultima title – something we’d be mighty okay with.

Until then, see you, space cowboy.

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Posted 09/02/08 at 08:30:18 PM by Pulkit Chandna

A computer worm primarily targeted at online gamers has found a very odd prey in form of the International Space Station. NASA confirmed last week that a computer worm had boarded the International Space Station and infected at least one laptop. Fortunately, though, none of the mission-critical systems were affected by the password-grabbing worm. NASA hasn’t revealed the name of the worm, but a website says that it is W32.Gammima.AG. Most of you might find the entire episode quite surprising and amusing, but the folks at NASA seem to be inured to computer worms aboard the ISS because this is not the first such instance.

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