Lifeboat Foundation

Stunning, truly.

NASA has presented us with yet another stunning, backlit view of Pluto, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby in July. The photo adds to the growing repertoire of Pluto images that are slowly being downloaded from the probe and released by the space agency. This one shows Pluto’s crescent in full, spectacular detail, completing the partial crescent image that NASA released in mid-September.

The image was taken by New Horizons’ Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), just 15 minutes after making its closest approach of Pluto on July 14th. It was taken from 11,000 miles away, when New Horizons looked back at Pluto toward the Sun. The photo shows the hazy layers of the dwarf planet’s atmosphere, as well as the mountains on Pluto’s surface that surround the icy plains of Sputnik Planum.

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Light given off by hydrogen shortly after the big bang has left some unexplained bright patches in space. Are they evidence of bumping into another universe?

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“Wolf went for a walk over the world from the Mir Space Station in the late 1990s and saw the Earth seemingly vanish. His recollection so moved New York-based artist Rachel Rose when she heard it on NPR that she went to considerable lengths to track him down for a personal retelling.”

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Photographs taken by astronaut Scott Kelly from the International Space Station are beautiful – but could a robot do better?

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Toyota’s three-seater exoskeleton car and an electric vehicle with touch screens that turn it into a “digital space” are among the concept models that will be on display at the Tokyo Motor Show this week.

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It’s likely a rocket casing, but astronomers aren’t for sure from where. All they know is that in three weeks, it will burn up over the Indian Ocean.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEUao7ysgDc

Watch this fantastic and breathtaking science fiction short film by the incredibly talented Richard Mans! See how a strange mechanical device lands on a desolate world and uses the planet to undergo a startling transformation, that has profound implications for an entire galaxy. For more information about this film, please see the details and links below:

http://www.abiogenesisfilm.com
http://www.facebook.com/abiogenesisfilm

Continue reading “CGI **AWARD-WINNING** Sci-Fi Short Film ‘Abiogenesis’” »

The primary objective of the mission is to find rare Earth elements that the team believes to be abundant on the moon.

California-based Moon Express is planning to make the first ever private moon landing by 2017. Their plan includes a series of robotic spacecraft intended to explore the moon’s surface and the possibility of commercial development. The company has teamed up with Rocket Lab to help launch their robotic spacecraft into the atmosphere. Rocket Lab uses battery-powered rocket engines that are cheaper than traditional engines.

If the plan succeeds, this is going to be the first ever privately-backed venture to achieve a lunar landing, and will hopefully encourage other enterprises to follow suit. From a financial perspective, the primary objective of this mission is to find rare Earth elements that the team believes are largely abundant on the Moon. If these elements are indeed found we can expect a new-age mini-lunar race to ensue.

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Just a few years ago, we were wondering where all the movies about outer space had gone. And now, we don’t have to wonder any more, because we’ve been getting a crop of fantastic new movies about astronauts, spaceships, and the joy of exploration.

There have been at least a couple of previous golden ages of space movies—the period following 2001 comes to mind, and so does the boom in space-opera adventures after Star Wars. The post-2001 boom saw a handful of idea-rich, very human-focused movies about ideas, which used space and science fiction as a way to further conversations and arguments that were rooted in the eras they were made in. Space, following Star Wars, became a fantastical, otherworldly setting, full of the magic and monsters of pulp serials and fantasy, dressed in other-worldly garb.

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