Sputnik anniversary

Fifty years ago today the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 was launched into orbit, thus beginning the space race. As a result Google has a new doodle today.

Sputnik wikipedia page

Shuttle Launch

Shuttle launches with teacher aboard
Spaceflight Now rolling updates
Real time space shuttle tracking

Planets and stars to scale (video)

M81 galaxy

The sharpest ever image of the M81 galaxy has been taken by the Hubble space telescope.

The sharpest image ever taken of the large "grand design" spiral galaxy M81 is being released today at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. A spiral-shaped system of stars, dust, and gas clouds, the galaxy's arms wind all the way down into the nucleus. Though the galaxy is located 11.6 million light-years away, the Hubble Space Telescope's view is so sharp that it can resolve individual stars, along with open star clusters, globular star clusters, and even glowing regions of fluorescent gas. The Hubble data was taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004 through 2006. This color composite was assembled from images taken in blue, visible, and infrared light.

Titan's coasts and drowned mountains

On May 12, 2007, Cassini completed its 31st flyby of Saturn's moon Titan, which the team calls T30. The radar instrument obtained this image showing the coastline and numerous island groups of a portion of a large sea, consistent with the larger sea seen by the Cassini imaging instrument
Read more here

Interstellar Ark

Interstellar Ark

Quote:
The concept of star travel, from planetary system to planetary system, is at the same time completely familiar and completely uncharted. Familiar, as we have certainly all heard of science fiction stories set on a far galaxy, where planets are nations or provinces of an empire. The characters usually move from one planet to another during intervals of time consistent with the story. The actual travel appears just like a formality, which the future advancements of a Triumphant Physics will put within reach. Read it all here

Marines in space

Semper Fly : Marines in space

Popular Science article on the proposed suborbital spacecraft that would deploy a batch of U.S. marines anywhere on the planet within 2 hours.

Hyperdrive engine a possibility?

In this this extraordinary article, The Scotsman reports that a hyperdrive engine could well be a possibility within 5 years. The engine is based on a fringe , untested area of physics, but the U.S. Airforce and NASA have expressed an interest.


"The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.

The theoretical engine works by creating an intense magnetic field that, according to ideas first developed by the late scientist Burkhard Heim in the 1950s, would produce a gravitational field and result in thrust for a spacecraft.

Also, if a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft would slip into a different dimension, where the speed of light is faster, allowing incredible speeds to be reached. Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension"

The paper quoted in the article is here (Google Scholar, HTML version)

Full New Scientist article has been posted on LiveJournal here