Aristyora's Deck

Unripe Apple

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 11:07:57 -0500

Unripe Apple

motherboardtv: SPACED OUT: The Unlikely Pair of Brooklyn...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:53:49 -0500

motherboardtv:

SPACED OUT: The Unlikely Pair of Brooklyn Designers Who Are Building a Better Space Suit

Busy street at night, in the heart of Surabaya

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:52:42 -0500

Busy street at night, in the heart of Surabaya

Little Friend

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 15:59:56 -0400

Little Friend

Olympus OM-D E-M5 Launching at Tunjungan Plaza LG

Sat, 09 Jun 2012 13:07:32 -0400

Olympus OM-D E-M5 Launching at Tunjungan Plaza LG

wildcat2030: Oscar Pistorius comes out of the starting blocks...

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 06:13:09 -0400

wildcat2030:

Oscar Pistorius comes out of the starting blocks in a race last year. In 2008, the South African sprinter was barred from competition; scientists successfully argued that the advantages of his prosthetics were offset by the disadvantages of being an amputee. He is now one race away from the London Olympics. (via Bionic Brains and Beyond - WSJ.com)

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Fri, 01 Jun 2012 02:16:47 -0400

cozydark: NASA’s NuSTAR Gearing Up for Launch | Final...

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 02:13:10 -0400

cozydark:

NASA’s NuSTAR Gearing Up for Launch |

Final pre-launch preparations are underway for NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. The mission, which will use X-ray vision to hunt for hidden black holes, is scheduled to launch no earlier than June 13 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The observatory will launch from the belly of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s L-1011 “Stargazer” aircraft aboard the company’s Pegasus rocket.

Technicians at Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California are busy installing the rocket’s fairing, or nose cone, around the observatory. A flight computer software evaluation is also nearing completion and should be finished before the Flight Readiness Review, which is scheduled for June 1. A successful launch simulation of the Orbital Sciences’ Pegasus XL rocket was conducted last week.

The mission plan is for NuSTAR and its rocket to be attached to the Stargazer plane on June 2. The aircraft will depart California on June 5 and arrive at the Kwajalein launch site on June 6. The launch of NuSTAR from the plane is targeted for 8:30 a.m. PDT (11:30 a.m. EDT) on June 13.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; and ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif. NuSTAR will be operated by UC Berkeley, with the Italian Space Agency providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission’s outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, Calif. NASA’s Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA

wildcat2030: From space Earth is simply a pale blue dot. It’s...

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 02:12:59 -0400

wildcat2030:

From space Earth is simply a pale blue dot. It’s blue because of all the water on its surface. In fact, a little more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, most of it ocean. But how much water is there, really? This image, produced by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), shows all of Earth’s water in three little orbs. The big one, over the western U.S., is all the water in the world—everything from the salty oceans to the water found deep underground. It looks small compared with the size of Earth, but that sphere’s volume is 1.38 billion cubic kilometers and it is about 1,385 kilometers in diameter. The smaller floating sphere in the middle at 272.8 kilometers in diameter represents a subset of that bigger sphere, showing freshwater in the ground, lakes, swamps and rivers. It doesn’t include permanent ice- and snowpacks locked in the polar ice caps—which is where much of the world’s freshwater is held; humans, unfortunately, do not have access to this supply. The tiny speck next to it represents and even smaller subset of all the water– just the freshwater in lakes and rivers. It, too, seems tiny by comparison with the big orb, but it is 56.2 kilometers in diameter. (via It’s a Water-Full World: Scientific American Gallery)

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Fri, 01 Jun 2012 02:11:02 -0400

thisbigcity: Is laneway housing a step in the right direction...

Wed, 30 May 2012 05:00:51 -0400

thisbigcity:

Is laneway housing a step in the right direction for walkable cities?

巷弄屋宅是否讓我們更接近步行城市？

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Sun, 27 May 2012 07:16:27 -0400

Photo

Sun, 27 May 2012 07:15:22 -0400

itsfullofstars: Voyager Spacecraft Facts A total of 11,000...

Sun, 27 May 2012 07:12:16 -0400

itsfullofstars:

Voyager Spacecraft Facts

A total of 11,000 workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.

A total of five trillion bits of scientific data had been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter. This represents enough bits to fill more than seven thousand music CDs.

Each Voyager spacecraft comprises 65,000 individual parts. Many of these parts have a large number of “equivalent” smaller parts such as transistors. One computer memory alone contains over one million equivalent electronic parts, with each spacecraft containing some five million equivalent parts. Since a color TV set contains about 2500 equivalent parts, each Voyager has the equivalent electronic circuit complexity of some 2000 color TV sets.

Both Voyagers were specifically designed and protected to withstand the large radiation dosage during the Jupiter swing-by. This was accomplished by selecting radiation-hardened parts and by shielding very sensitive parts. An unprotected human passenger riding aboard Voyager 1 during its Jupiter encounter would have received a radiation dose equal to one thousand times the lethal level.

A set of small thrusters provides Voyager with the capability for attitude control and trajectory correction. Each of these tiny assemblies has a thrust of only three ounces. In the absence of friction, on a level road, it would take nearly six hours to accelerate a large car up to a speed of 48 km/h (30 mph) using one of the thrusters.

Voyager’s fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle’s 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2’s great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune resulted in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon).

Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2025), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further operation. Were it not for these dwindling consumables and the possibility of losing lock on the faint Sun, our tracking antennas could continue to “talk” with the Voyagers for another century or two!

fyeahcosmonauts: Oleg Kononenko took a tour of the ISS with a...

Thu, 24 May 2012 06:24:21 -0400

Zvezda Service Module

Between the Russian modules

Pirs docking compartment

Zarya - Functional Cargo Block

US Unity module

Cupola

ESA's Edoardo Amaldi ATV

US Harmony module

Japanese Kibo module

fyeahcosmonauts:

Oleg Kononenko took a tour of the ISS with a fisheye lens. Everything looks a lot bigger!

(Roscosmos)

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Thu, 24 May 2012 06:22:35 -0400

xgames: Here is a look at some of May’s finest photos,...

Thu, 24 May 2012 06:20:56 -0400

xgames:

Here is a look at some of May’s finest photos, including this one from Foz do Iguacu, Brazil, one of the future homes of X Games!

your fart is very very smelly…. gimme a break

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:46:00 -0400

your fart is very very smelly…. gimme a break

Jacko : “oh damn she is so sexyy” partner:...

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:17:00 -0400

Jacko : “oh damn she is so sexyy”

partner: “im agree with you”

Lady: “where r u lookin at?!”

Artificial Intelligence: Two robots battle to be "First Absolute World Chess Blitz Champion"

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:10:11 -0400

Artificial Intelligence: Two robots battle to be "First Absolute World Chess Blitz Champion":

alexob:

On May 19th in a Park in Moscow the battle for the Absolute World Robot Chess Champion title was on between ChessKA (also called the Chess Terminator) and Robot KUKA Monster. CHESSka, the first chess robot defeating grandmasters in the quick chess game, was created by the…