nasa

Arctic sea ice is not only shrinking in coverage area; it's also thinning, according to a report and satellite images jointly released on Monday by NASA and the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.

The Arctic basin is covered in a thick semipermanent sea ice, which is covered in thin seasonal ice caps that are built up each winter, only to melt away again each summer.

The 2009 Arctic summer-melting season is starting out with a substantial amount of thin seasonal ice and an unusually small amount of the thick sea ice, making … Read more

It's been a long hiatus since the last time a human strode across the lunar terrain, and we're still some years out from the next planned mission to the moon.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't tinker around with notions of how astronauts in the not-too-distant future might get around the Sea of Tranquility or some other lunar destination. That's part of the driving force behind NASA's Great Moonbuggy Race, an annual event geared toward college and high school students.

The mission: design and build a lightweight, human-powered buggy, then race it around a … Read more

Snow and soggy conditions at the primary landing site in Kazakhstan prompted Russian flight planners on Friday to order a 24-hour delay, from April 7 to 8, for the return to Earth of a Soyuz capsule carrying outgoing space station commander Mike Fincke, flight engineer Yury Lonchakov, and space tourist Charles Simonyi.

The mission had been scheduled to conclude with a touchdown on April 7 northeast of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, but the landing zone has been moved to a backup site about 180 miles to the southeast, where conditions may be more favorable. Touchdown now is targeted for 3:15 a.… Read more

The whole world was fooled into fearing a huge storm of worminess that never happened. Was it because we were prepared or because it really wasn't that big of a deal at all? We also avoid most of the April Foolery and talk some Nehalem processors and BlackBerry App World.

Want April Fool’s updates? Go watch Loaded. http://cnettv.cnet.com/2001-1_53-50005651.html

Web 2.0 Expo http://news.cnet.com/webware/

Live blog: Countdown to Conficker http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10208722-83.html http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/conficker-war-r.html… Read more

The space shuttle Atlantis, bolted to a mobile launch platform atop an Apollo-era crawler-transporter, was hauled to launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday for work to ready the ship for blastoff May 12 on a fifth and final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

Originally scheduled for launch on October 14, the long-awaited Hubble overhaul was delayed when one channel of a critical data-processing system unit aboard the telescope failed just two weeks before liftoff. NASA managers decided to replace Hubble's entire science instrument command and data handling unit, or SI/C&DH, to restore redundancy and improve reliability.

But testing a spare ground unit at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., getting it certified for flight, and working the mission back into NASA's shuttle manifest ended up delaying Atlantis and Hubble Servicing Mission 4, or SM-4, for seven months, when all was said and done.

The replacement SI/C&DH was delivered to the Kennedy Space Center on Monday, and Atlantis, attached to an external fuel tank and two solid-fuel boosters, took its first step toward space with a six-and-a-half-hour, 3.2-mile trip from the Vehicle Assembly Building to pad 39A on Tuesday.

Shuttle commander Scott Altman, pilot Gregory C. Johnson, flight engineer Megan McArthur, and spacewalkers John Grunsfeld, Michael Massimino, Andrew Feustel, and Michael Good plan to fly to Kennedy late this week to inspect the replacement computer unit before it is moved to the pad April 18, along with the rest of the Hubble payload, for installation in Atlantis' cargo bay.… Read more

Ron Richards from iFanboy joins us as we finish today's show with a discussion of "geek" vs. "nerd" and decide "dork" is the next wave. We also talk about a cow that poops money, also known as Jonathan Coulton's business model. And we get mad at AT&T.

AT&T working with RIAA http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10203799-93.html

How it works for a real musician http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2009/03/24/payday/

John Mellencamp: Back In The Good Old Days… … Read more

For some reason, every time high-tech underwear news hits the Internet, my editors think it's something I need to cover (pun intended). This time, though, it's underwear from space. And it's Japanese underwear from space that lasts up to a week before you have to change it--for better or worse.

According to Reuters, the clothing called J-ware is currently being tested aboard the International Space Station, perhaps to the dismay of Koichi Wakata's fellow astronauts.

The skivvies, developed by textile specialists at Japan Women's University in Tokyo, are meant to absorb moisture, kill bacteria, and … Read more

If you think the new Google Earth update that shows even more about Mars' surface is cool, Microsoft thinks what's it's about to offer is even cooler.

The company, together with NASA, announced on Tuesday plans to make planetary images and data available via the Internet. The two organizations will jointly develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to make NASA content--including high-resolution scientific images and data from Mars and the moon--explorable on Microsoft's online virtual telescope for exploring the universe, called WorldWide Telescope.

The WorldWide Telescope is a Web 2.0 visualization environment that functions as a … Read more

If the results of an online poll are any indication, NASA may soon be naming a new wing of the International Space Station, Node 3, after late-night comedian Stephen Colbert.

According to the Associated Press, write-ins for "Colbert" crushed all of NASA's four poll options, pulling in 230,539 votes; the second-place choice, NASA suggestion "Serenity" (a nod to sci-fi hero Joss Whedon) was more than 40,000 votes behind. Writer Dave Barry also threw his hat in the ring, suggesting "Buddy" as the perfect name for Node 3. But he didn't … Read more