Red Rover, Red Rover, Let Curiosity Come Over

 I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Time's Techland blog has a great piece showing the technology on the Mars Curiosity Rover. I've posted about the 7 minute process for Curiosity to land on Martian soil from orbit. Curiosity is scheduled to land on the red planet on August 6th to commence its mission of looking for signs of life such as water.

The coolest piece of tech that Techland features is the Heat Rejection System, which pumps out heat when it's hot and stores heat when it's cold.  Even in my mighty man cave, my computer needs a constant room temperature to run smoothly. On Mars, where the temperature can vary 300 F in a single day, this heat regulation is even more important. Additionally, temperature change can cause metal to expand and contract rapidly, meaning that the rover has to tolerate this variability in the metal throughout the day.

 To view the fact sheet for the mission, click here. There's also a lot of Curiosity games on the Xbox Kinect, web, mobile, and tablet devices - check them out here!

Spaceflight and Global Collaboration

One facet of space travel that is underreported is the level of global collaboration required. Many countries (not all - for example, China) have contributed time and research to to projects such as the International Space Station. A good example of this collaboration is the Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying astronauts from different countries to the space station, which occured yesterday.

MSNBC gives a short blurb on the history of this global collaboration:

"By coincidence, the U.S.-Russian-Japanese crew's launch and docking is coinciding with the 37th anniversary of the world's first international space mission: the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project."

"On July 15, 1975, NASA launched an Apollo capsule and the Soviet Union launched its Soyuz 19 capsule to perform the first international space docking test. The mission set the foundation for the international partnerships that have led to the $100 billion International Space Station in orbit today."

Check out details on the crew known as Expedition 32 - which consists of American, Japanese, and Russian personnel - at NASA's site!

#ScienceLooksGood: The Superhero Shuffle

This is one of my favorite books of all time! The Physics of Superheroes is a fun read that uses known comic examples to explain properties of physics.  For example, Kakalios talks about how force, mass, and acceleration would come into play if Superman is actually able to jump over tall buildings in a single bound!

The author, Jim Kakalios, served as a science consultant for the new Spiderman movie. In the YouTube video below, he talks about the gig and exactly how he created the "decay algorithm" used in the film. Check it out!

As you can see, Jim is also a strong proponent of making science for everyone and avoiding complicated jargon and other mess that makes science hard to understand. I respect the man and I hope that my blog has a similar effect.

SkyLab: Bad Management Hurts Good Tech

The History Channel has a great article on the 33 year anniversary of the demise of the first space station, SkyLab. It's a prime example of how technology can quickly become disastrous if not managed correctly by its owners.

I'm sure we've all been a part of projects were some phase - whether the beginning, middle, or end - was not properly planned out. It happens. But when that project is above all of our heads and rains chunks of metal over Australia during its reentry, it's a big deal.

NASA spent so much energy in the 60s and 70s designing, building, and launching SkyLab that they forgot to think about it's inevitable decline and descent back to Earth. Oops.

If you want to get really geeky, check out the full project history at the official NASA Skylab site. Beach reading!

YouTube Cartoons Solve The Universe?

Remember all the talk about the Higgs Boson, or the "god particle", during the 4th of July? Still confused? I still had some questions until I viewed the video series by MinutePhysics. They do an AMAZING job - check it out!

There are some other science geek things in the video like quarks, hadrons, charm, strange etc. Trust me, you can safely ignore those and still get the point of the video! Don't be scared!

The only thing to be scared of is this comments. This is still YouTube so ... stay away from the comments!