It's nap time little martian
Today was Opportunity Rover’s 5,000 Martian Day! Yay! Just in case you don’t know Opportunity, here are a few little facts.
First, The opportunity Rover was launched on July 7th of 2003. It was lauched with another rover named Spirit. They landed on Mars in Janurary of 2004. Unfortunately Spirit stopped working in 2010 , but Opportunity is still alive and helping us understand Mars.
Initially Opportuinity was only supposed to be around for 90 Earth days, but instead it’s gotten tons of extensions and is still collecting data today.
Opportunity is run by a solar panel and is almost 5 feet tall. The solar panels hold enough energy for 14 hours, and the batteries help store energy for use at night. All of that helps to keep our little robot running. He currently holds the record for longest distance travelled “off-world.”
As of right now Opportunity is “hibernating” through the Martian winter and will wake up again in March (yay!) to help with more scientific discoveries.
Happy 5,000 Martian Day Opportunity! And thanks for everything you do <3
Metal Rover Model Kit
Opportunity Poster
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Printing microelectrode arrays on gelatin and other soft materials could pave the way for new medical diagnostics tools
Microelectrodes can be used for direct measurement of electrical signals in the brain or heart. These applications require soft materials, however. With existing methods, attaching electrodes to such materials poses significant challenges. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now succeeded in printing electrodes directly onto several soft substrates.
Researchers from TUM and Forschungszentrum Jülich have successfully teamed up to perform inkjet printing onto a gummy bear. This might initially sound like scientists at play – but it may in fact point the way forward to major changes in medical diagnostics. For one thing, it was not an image or logo that Prof. Bernhard Wolfrum’s team deposited on the chewy candy, but rather a microelectrode array. These components, comprised of a large number of electrodes, can detect voltage changes resulting from activity in neurons or muscle cells, for example.
Second, gummy bears have a property that is important when using microelectrode arrays in living cells: they are soft. Microelectrode arrays have been around for a long time. In their original form, they consist of hard materials such as silicon. This results in several disadvantages when they come into contact with living cells. In the laboratory, their hardness affects the shape and organization of the cells, for example. And inside the body, the hard materials can trigger inflammation or the loss of organ functionalities.
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Rocket into sub-orbit on Blue Origin’s New Shepard! (December 15, 2017) It’s a pristine day in west Texas. The desert stretches far to the horizon out the capsule’s windows with the foothills of the Van Horn mountain range in the distance. The typical winter day is broken first by a deep rumble from below followed an instant later by clouds of smoke and a flash of flame. That’s the scene inside Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule during launch as seen in new footage from this week’s test. Mannequin Skywalker - the company’s astronaut simulator - is seen rocketing to over 322,000 feet, or 61 miles, strapped in one of the cabin’s six seats.
Within seconds, the receding countryside below gives way to vast swaths of desert. The sky turns from thick and blue to pitch black in a matter of seconds as the vehicle races upwards. New Shepard would reach a maximum ascent velocity of Mach 2.94 during the flight. As the single BE-3 engine of the propulsion stage cuts out, the cabin becomes weightless as indicated by straps on the dummy’s chest. Hundreds of miles of the Earth below spread out in all directions from the cabin’s six panoramic windows. Measuring 2.4 by 3.6 feet, they’re the largest ever flown on a space vehicle. Weightless conditions and breathtaking views continue as the capsule begins its descent to Earth. It’s like the launch but in reverse; the black of space quickly fills with colour as the atmosphere is reentered. Because New Shepard is a suborbital vehicle and doesn’t boost the capsule fast enough to achieve significant atmospheric friction, there is no flaming meteor-in-the-sky or heat shield on the spacecraft. It simply falls through the sky, racing to meet the Earth below which it only just left. Back in the thicker atmosphere, three drogue parachutes help stabilize the cabin before the larger main canopies are unfurled. These help bring the capsule to a safe, soft landing at just one foot per second a few kilometers from the launch pad. According to Blue Origin’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, the pinging heard inside the capsule in the video was due to one of the 12 experiments carried on board Mission 7. This was the first New Shepard flight granted a commercial launch license by the FAA, allowing them to carry commercial research payloads on the flight. Other flight milestones can also be discerned by the subtle audio and visual clues, such as MECO, stage separation, drogue cute deployment and mail parachute deployment. Read our full story on Mission 7 and the resumption of New Shepard testing by clicking here.
Check out the full video with audio by clicking here or below.
P/C: Blue Origin.
Apply independently produced drug to the burnt area
Lego’s new “Women of NASA” set is now available, and the product has already risen to the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling toys.
The set of 231 plastic pieces costs about $25 and went on sale Wednesday morning. Its instant popularity is not surprising to those who have been following Lego’s laudable — and presumably profitable — trend of selling toys that are more inclusive of women.
“Women of NASA” features four mini figurines of pioneering women from the space agency: the astronauts Sally Ride and Mae Jemison, the astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, and the computer scientist Margaret Hamilton.
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It`s gonna be Moon Soon season in India!! @neysastudies
The last time any country put boots or, rather, little metal feet, on the Moon was in 2013, when China landed its Yutu rover there. Before that, you’d have to look back to the 1970s to find anything built by Earthlings that camped out on the surface of the Moon.
But in 2018, India says it will be ready to join the ranks of the moon lander. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is getting ready to land its very first lunar rover by the end of March 2018, as part of its Chandrayaan-2 mission.
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How is it that fertilized chicken eggs manage to resist fracture from the outside, while at the same time, are weak enough to break from the inside during chick hatching? It’s all in the eggshell’s nanostructure, according to a new study led by McGill University scientists.
The findings, reported today in Science Advances, could have important implications for food safety in the agro-industry.
Birds have benefited from millions of years of evolution to make the perfect eggshell, a thin, protective biomineralized chamber for embryonic growth that contains all the nutrients required for the growth of a baby chick. The shell, being not too strong, but also not too weak (being “just right” Goldilocks might say), is resistant to fracture until it’s time for hatching.
But what exactly gives bird eggshells these unique features?
To find out, Marc McKee’s research team in McGill’s Faculty of Dentistry, together with Richard Chromik’s group in Engineering and other colleagues, used new sample-preparation techniques to expose the interior of the eggshells to study their molecular nanostructure and mechanical properties.
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Biggest Ferris wheel ever: the Jupiter Eye
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