Better yet how about getting information for houses in your neighborhood or any neighborhood? Get a bird’s eye view of house or neighborhood.
Go to http://www.zillow.com to find out more.
Having already been to the the moon, Google goes to Mars and takes us there with Google Mars.
Besides looking at the pretty pictures via the elevation map, you can check out the "visible" and "infrared" views, as well as the mountains, ridges, plains and craters of the red planet, as tagged by Google. And clicking on the stories link will lead you to some background information on various sites, like the Bacolor Crater.
Via Warping it up!
Well, you’re too late and about $98,000 short if — like most of us — you don’t happen to have that kind of change lying around. But if you had it to spare and had happened across a particular Ebay posting over the weekend, you could have bought a Soviet Space Shuttle.
OK, OK. So it’s not an actual space shuttle. It’s a 1/8 model that was used in various flight tests for the Soviet’s Buran space shuttle.
The BOR-5 is a 1400 kg exact 1/8 scale model of the Soviet space shuttle Buran. The BOR-5 is 15’6" Long (17′ w/trailer) X 9’10" Wide (wingtip to wingtip) X 5’10" Tall (8’10" Tall on trailer). It was used to validate the aero-dynamic characteristics of the Buran at hypersonic speeds, between 1983 and 1988. The BOR-5 was launched on probably five sub-orbital trajectories from Kapustin Yar, in the direction of Lake Balkhash, using SL-8 (Cosmos) rockets (Russian designation: K65M-RB5). BOR is the abbreviation for Bezpilotnyy Orbitalnyy Raketoplan (Unmanned Orbital Rocketplane).
BOR-5 flights tested (amoung other things) carbon-based and quartz fiber heat-shield material paving the way for the Buran Shuttle. Russian sources are contradictory as to the number of BOR-5 flights. An except from one report reads: " … At an approximate altitude of 110-120 km height, the Cosmos booster pitched down, driving at full thrust for several minutes, accelerated the model to Mach 18.5 at 45 degrees, before separation. The craft landed using a parachute landing system after a flight of 2000 km.
But those are just details, really. How cool would it be to start conversations with, "So, you know, I own a space shuttle"? If you happen to have $25,000 to spare between now and April you still have shot at an original NASA space shuttle prototype. Sure it’s only .008 scale, but it’s still a space shuttle, right? Anyway, if that’s too big of a hit to the wallet, you can always bid on about a ton of other space memorabilia.
Arianespace is launching two satellites: HOT BIRD 7A and SPAINSAT. I plan to watch it live — on Saturday night.
Launch window opens 22:05 GMT on 11 March 2006 (7:05 p.m. local time in Kourou, French Guiana; 5:05 p.m. in Washington, D.C.). Webcast begins 20 minutes prior.
Kourou is known as Europe’s Spaceport. First settled by the French in 1604, French Guiana was the site of notorious penal settlements (see Devil’s Island) until 1951.
Here’s a use for satellites I hadn’t thought of, but wish I had. No matter where you live, chances are you’ve seen "lost pet" signs stapled to telephone poles, stapled to streetlights, or tacked to grocery store bulletin boards. I always wondered if those signs really helped people find pets who’ve been struck with wanderlust. My guess is that it’s probably hit-or-miss. Via Gizmodo comes news of Global Pet Finder, which uses GPS and 2-way wireless technology to help customers find their lost pets. Their customer testimonials don’t mention any lost pets that have been found, but some owners have gotten pet location alerts via SMS, so my guess it that it’s probably more effective than posting signs all over town.
As someone who finds it challenging to put together my three-year-old son’s toys, I’m rather in awe people who can build stuff — from a simple birdhouse to space-bound rockets and satellites. Lately, I’ve noticed people of all ages taking dreams and ideas from mere ideas on paper to reality. In particular, I’m rather in awe of some Philladelphia high school students who built a hybrid car that runs on soybeans.
A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver’s interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School
The five kids, along with a handful of schoolmates, built the soybean-fueled car as an after-school project. It took them more than a year — rummaging for parts, configuring wires and learning as they went. As teacher Simon Hauger notes, these kids weren’t exactly the cream of the academic crop.
“We have a number of high school dropouts,” he says. “We have a number that have been removed for disciplinary reasons and they end up with us.”
…”If you give kids that have been stereotyped as not being able to do anything an opportunity to do something great, they’ll step up,” he says.
The high school inventors have more than earned their “Fab Five” moniker, but they’re not the only ones building some pretty amazing things. Just in the past week, Make Magazine has featured an update on a Rube Goldberg contest at Purdue University, and a Mexican grandfather who builds his own rockets. I f you’re inclined to try your own hand at this, you can check their post on making water rockets, or visit Dirk’s Rocket Dungeon and check out some old rocket plans for reference.
As for me, I’ll stick to putting together my kid’s toys. That’s challenge enough for me.
Universe Today has a couple of posts up featuring some fascinting satellite imagery, and even a link to some pretty cool imagination. One features some images of Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus from NASA Astrobiology, while the other concerns a cosmic explosion seen by NASA’s Swift satellite.
The Swift satellite, whose mission control center is in State College, has detected a cosmic explosion that has sent scientists around the world scrambling to telescopes to document this startling event. Gamma-ray radiation from the source, detected on 18 February and lasting about half an hour, appears to be a precursor to a supernova, which is the death throes of a star much more massive than the Sun. "The observations indicate that this is an incredibly rare glimpse of an initial gamma-ray burst at the beginning of a supernova," said Peter Brown, a Penn State graduate student and a member of the Swift science team.
The Penn State release also links to a pretty cool collapsing star animation, collapsing stars being one of the "leading contenders" for causing gamma ray bursts like the one Swift detected. Also check out the link to NASA’s Goddard Space Center for multimedia from Goddard TV.
For fans of the X Prize, the Red Bull (ne Reno) Air Races, and rocketry and aviation in general, the future is bright (with a 20 foot flame behind it) and approaching fast.
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis and race car capitalist Granger Whitelaw launched the Rocket Racing League last October, and the first Rocket Racing Team was announced last month.
The Rocket Racing League [will] organize competitions around the United States, with the finals taking place at the X Prize Cup in New Mexico.
"It’s bringing 21st-century racing into people’s personal living rooms. … It’s really the mix of NASCAR excitement and spaceflight," Diamandis told journalists Monday….
"For me, it’s sort of a remembrance of ‘Star Wars’ pod racing," Diamandis said….
"Courses are expected to be approximately two miles long, one mile wide, and about 5,000 feet high, running perpendicularly to spectators," the league said. "The rocket planes, called X-Racers, will take off from a runway both in a staggered fashion and side-by side and fly a course based on the design of a Grand Prix competition, with long straightaways, vertical ascents, and deep banks. Each pilot will follow his or her own virtual ‘tunnel’ or ‘track’ of space through which to fly, safely separated from their competitors by a few hundred feet."
The League also announced a contest allowing fans to name the first X-Racer Rocket Plane. Meanwhile, Sebadoh is accepting donations to pay for travel to the debut of the first X-Racer, this October in Las Cruces. Pony up, Rocco.
It hasn’t been long since NASA’s “Stardust” returned to earth, but scientists are already slicing and dicing microscopic specks of comet dust collected by the space probe. We’re talking “dust” that’s as old as the solar system, verified comet matter, seen for the first time by NASA scientists. Interesting stuff. Fortunately, NASA scientists are letting the public in on the fun.
Stardust@Home appears to be modeled after SETI@Home, in the sense that you can volunteer your computer’s unused resources to help with the project by performing mathematical calculations, etc. There’s just one significant difference. They don’t just want your computer’s resources. They want your brainpower too.
First, you will go through a web-based training session. This is not for everyone: you must pass a test to qualify to register to participate. After passing the test and registering, you will be able to download a virtual microscope (VM). The VM will automatically connect to our server and download so-called “focus movies” — stacks of images that we will collect from the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector using an automated microscope at the Cosmic Dust Lab at Johnson Space Center. The VM will work on your computer, under your control. You will search each field for interstellar dust impacts by focusing up and down with a focus control.
If that sounds exciting to you, and you think you can pass the test, go pre-register to help them out!
If you’re one of many commuters who spend countless hours in the car between work and home, you’ve probably seen more than your share of gridlock. Chances are at least once or twice you’ve closed your eyes and dreamed of your car sprouting rockets and wings to lift you far above the parking lot that used to be a freeway. Well, don’t go trading your drivers’ license for a pilot’s license just yet, but some of MIT’s "Aeronautics and Astronautics" students are working on making your rocket car dreams come true.
This summer, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will try to get an idea aloft that has intrigued people for decades: the flying car.
Terrafugia, a start-up created by Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winner Carl Dietrich and colleagues at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is aiming to show off what it calls the Transition "personal air vehicle," an SUV with retractable wings, to the EAA AirVenture Conference in Oshkosh, Wis., at the end of July.
The Transition is designed for 100- to 500-mile jumps. It will carry two people and luggage on a single tank of premium unleaded gas. It will also come with an electric calculator (to help fine-tune weight distribution), airbags, aerodynamic bumpers and of course a GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation unit.
Right now, there’s no prototype (I told you not to get your hopes up yet) and according to the article the company doesn’t plan to have one of these in the air before 2009 or 2010. Meanwhile, you can start saving up for one, and check out the pictures of their (one-fifth scale) wind tunnel model. While you’re at it, why not print out a copy and attach it to your sun visor just to have something concrete to dream about while you wait for the traffic to inch forward again?