Two 17-year old Canadian students Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad had some free time—but instead of squandering it on Skyrim they they launched a Lego man into space. They attached recording equipment and linked the parachute to a GPS tracker. The figure had four cameras attached, and they captured some amazing images. All-in-all, they spent four months worth of Saturdays plotting the mission at a cost of only $400 for equipment.
The figure was in the air for 97 minutes and got as high as 80,000 feet. For perspective, that’s three times higher than Mount Everest. I have a hunch this project is going help them get into a number of fine higher learning institutions.
Watch the impressive video after the break.
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LEGO pro Ryan McNaught (aka The BrickMan) constructed a ridiculously impressive 19-foot tall Saturn V rocket replica (with gantry) out of 120,000 bricks over the course of 250 hours. It’s the largest LEGO model in Australia.
Check out more images after the break to see some of the little details McNaught added in.
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Photographer Alan Friedman captures “Sunsquatch”—a gas eruption on the sun that looks a lot like Bigfoot.
Check out the full image on CubicleBot…
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I wouldn’t say it’s enough to make up for the disappointment many feel after the grounding of NASA’s shuttle program, but free ringtones are free ringtones!
NASA has made historic sound bites like Neil Armstrong’s “The Eagle has landed” and Apollo 13′s “Houston, we’ve had a problem” available for download to cellphones and computers to be used as ringtones, alarms and notifications.
“NASA has been making historic sounds for over 50 years,” Jerry Colen, NASA App project manager at the agency’s Ames Research Center, said in statement. “Now we’re making some of these memorable sounds easy to find and use.”
NASA claims the sounds will be updated regularly and they can be downloaded here in MP3 and M4R (iPhone) formats.
(via The LA Times)
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In a bit of news that will surely have the attention every Star Wars fan, a team using data from NASA’s $600 million Kepler telescope have discovered a planet that has two suns. Although its official title is “Kepler-16b”, scientists at NASA and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute [SETI] have informally named the planet “Tatooine” – a nod to George Lucas and the Star Wars universe. According to SETI’s Laurance Doyle, who led the team of researchers:
“When we first discovered it … I sent around a message, ‘Hey, you know guys, we should ask George Lucas if we can nickname this guy Tatooine. Suddenly and unexpectedly after years of looking for a circumbinary planet – we got a beauty.”
Doyle also reported that a double sunset on the real Tatooine would be much more dramatic that what we see in “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.” For someone standing on the planet’s surface, one of the suns would appear orange and the other red. If you’re hoping for a trip to the newly discovered planet, it’s probably not going to happen. It is located about 200 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. Getting there would take about two centuries if you were going at light speed, or 186,282 miles per second.
Check out the video after the break to learn more.
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Some people think about space and are inspired to create needle felted tributes. That or they are participating in an Etsy craft competition. Whatever the reason, @flyingjenny made this crafty representation of the NASA Hubble Servicing Mission 4. I’m confident that she has boldly taken needle felting where it’s never gone before.
(via Make)
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The SETI (or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institutes’s Allen Telescope Array, which is made up of 42 networked radio telescopes searching for alien life, shut down in 2008 after its operator, the Radio Astronomy Lab of UC Berkeley, ran out of funds. SETI then went to work seeking $200,000 from the public for reactivation, and recently announced that the necessary funds had been acquired after nearly 2,300 folks ponied up the dough.
SETI co-founder Tom Pierson now thinks operations could resume as early as this September.
(PhysOrg via DVICE)
Guy Himber describes his amazing Lego orrery:
I always wanted to build something like this ever since I saw a giant fantasy orrery in the movie Dark Crystal. As it has been on my builder’s ‘wish list’ for a while I figured the Iron Builder Competition was a perfect time to try one out!
I made it with the Sun off-centered ( vs. center ) to make it more dynamic to view. The cycles and planets and moons are all fantasy based ( so go cry to your Mom if you don’t like how Mars has a Moon or Venus looks like Jupiter )
Check out the orrery in action after the break.
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