NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a couple of educational videos up on YouTube called “Mars In A Minute” that teach you little tidbits about the Red Planet. There’s the one above, showing you how to get there, and sort of explaining why there’s a flurry of Mars launches right now, but there won’t be next year. There’s also another, asking is it really red?

I hope they do more — they’re just the kind of videos that are accessible and not condescending to kids in order to get them excited about space exploration.

An “orrery” is, according to Wikipedia, “a mechanical device that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the solar system in a heliocentric model. They are typically driven by a clockwork mechanism with a globe representing the Sun at the centre, and with a planet at the end of each of the arms.”

This one, of course, is Flash-based, not mechanical. And, like many orreries, it suffers from the fact that it is not to scale — either size or precise time. But it’s still cool. And it does have the benefit of being able to switch between Copernican and Tychonian models of the solar system!

Click here to see it in the full size of your browser.

(Source, via MeFi)

(Click for full-size)

Say what you will about communism, but the Soviets really jazzed up the space race.

(via pmgtg)

Wow, this video really shows how many satellites orbit around the earth to provide us with telephone, television, GPS and other services. Of course, the satellite icons are probably 1000x larger than the satellites really are — but it’s still pretty crowded up there.

(via @dirtywett)

Now this is pretty cool! Only a couple more launches left if you want to make the trek.

Here’s a cool animation that shows what it would be like if, instead of the Moon orbiting Earth, we had a planet instead. Like Mars. Or Earth itself. Or Neptune.

So the basic idea is, each planet you see is the size it would appear in the sky if it shared an orbit with the moon, 380,000 kms from earth. I created this video in After Effects, and because of certain technical considerations had to keep the field of view at 62 degrees. That means the foreground element is not precisely to scale. I realized this after the fact and may update the video at some point in the future. All planets are to correct scale with one another in any case.

Animator Brad Goodspeed explains that he has calculated it to be from the centrepoint of each planet, so that the surface of Jupiter, say, is a lot closer than the surface of the Moon.

Pretty darn close, I saw.

(via tdw)

Forty-five minutes of some of the best footage of the space shuttle I’ve ever seen — close-ups and slow-motion capture from NASA engineering cameras, including technical details that really put the space shuttle into glorious perspective.

Don’t have 45 minutes? Find it. Because if I find out that you instead chose to rent some crappy rom-com, I might just travel to your house and rip it from your DVD player.

Sadly, I think the space shuttle is, partly, a victim of its own success: its goal was to make space travel mundane. It never did that, of course — each launch is a marvel — but it sure made people treat it as mundane.

More space travel, less War on Terror, please.

(via Jalopnik)

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website at http://www.nasa.gov.

Participants are:
-     Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
-     Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
-     Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
-     Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
-     James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

Media representatives may attend the conference or ask questions by phone or from participating NASA locations. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov or call 202-358-0918 by noon Dec. 2.

For NASA TV streaming video and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about NASA astrobiology activities, visit:

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov

- end -

I want to know NOW!

(press release from NASA)

And, we have a 75 per cent chance of such a discovery by the end of 2013.

Of course, still no news on how we might actually get there.

Last week, I happened across a post by Ben Terrett about how many times you would have to print the word “helvetica” — set in Helvetica, of course, at 100 pt — in order to reach from the Earth to the Moon. The answer he found, was 2,826,206,643.42.

That, I thought, was awesome.

But the ever-reliable Jason Kottke took it one step further.

What, he thought, about doing it the other way? How big would a “helvetica” have to be, if it were to stretch from the Earth to the Moon in just one step?

From the Earth (nudged up against the h) to the Moon (lined up with the tail on the a) is exactly one “helvetica” — if that is set in 282.6 billion pt. Yikes

Kottke calculates that “the ‘h’ would be 44,600 miles tall, roughly 5.6 times as tall as the Earth.”

Whoa.

It was always a highlight of the show, no matter which flavour of Star Trek you were watching. The music would swell, the Enterprise (or perhaps some other ship) would dramatically bank past the camera, then the engine would spin up and the ship would suddenly spring forward, blurred and leaving tracers behind, to disappear into a flash of light.

Warp speed.

Whenever they had an episode that featured ships from the future, or advanced ships from a never-before-seen alien species, they always tweaked the warp effects a little bit, and you always wondered what they would do. It was kind of like the cousin of the transporter effect, which also differed throughout the years.

You know, if we ever do learn how to bend time and space around a spacecraft, I wonder what it would look like to an outside observer.

(via Gizmodo)

Astronaut Don Pettit takes time-lapse videos of the Earth, as seen from his orbital viewpoint, and shares them with the Internet. That is awesome.

This one gets a little repetitive, since it appears he’s using the same shots multiple times, but I never get tired of seeing that aurora, especially when it pops up the first time, at about 0:15.

Gizmodo has a gallery of some of this other videos, but I found this one on the Daily What.

Now there’s a blog that gives you pseudo-scientific explanations for everyday experiences in that same, completely wrong, spirit.

Check out Fake Science — and see if you can spot the fake!

I’ve got four more of my favourites, after the jump:

That’s awesome. Take a tour:

NASA wants to put a picture of you on one of the two remaining space shuttle missions and launch it into orbit. To launch your face into space and become a part of history, just follow these steps:

First…Select the Participate button at the bottom of this page and upload your image/name, which will be flown aboard the space shuttle. Don’t have a picture to upload? No problem, just skip the image upload and we will fly your name only on your selected mission!

Next…Print and save the confirmation page with your flight information.

Later… Return after the landing to print your Flight Certificate – a commemorative certificate signed by the Mission Commander.

There’s also a map of the participating countries — so far, fewer than 1,000 Canadians, so I’m in pretty rarefied company