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NASA is funding a 3D food printer, and it'll start with pizza By Aaron Souppourison May 21, 2013 07:24 am NASA is funding research into 3D-printed food. As Quartz reveals, Mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor received a $125,000 grant from the agency to build a prototype 3D printer with the aim of automating food creation. It's hoped the system could provide astronauts food during long-distance space travel, but its creator has the loftier aim of solving the increasing food shortages around the world by cutting down on waste. The software for the printer will be open-source, while the hardware is based on...

On the evening of 23 March, 1983, Ronald Reagan delivered a televised address about defence and national security. "Let me share with you a vision of the future," the president began in what was a last-minute addition to the half-hour speech. In Reagan's vision, we would "embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive." It was the first mention of Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), the plan to change America's nuclear posture from offensive to defensive. His goal was to render the Soviet nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Reagan's admirers praised SDI...

Planet-hunting scientists were dealt a major blow Wednesday when NASA officials announced that a crucial wheel on the Kepler space telescope had ceased to function and that the craft had been placed in safe mode. Even as NASA officials raised the possibility that they could get the telescope back up and running, scientists began mourning the potential loss of a spacecraft that they said had fundamentally altered our understanding of alien planets in the Milky Way—and Earth’s place in an increasingly crowded galaxy. “Tears are coming to my eyes on and off,” said UC Berkeley astrophysicist Geoff Marcy, a co-investigator...

NASA’s Curiosity rover has reached out in a Martian ‘handshake’ like gesture welcoming the end of solar conjunction that marks the resumption of contact with her handlers back on Earth – evidenced in a new photo mosaic of images captured as the robot and her human handlers contemplate a short traverse to a 2nd drilling target in the next few days. “We’ll move a small bit and then drill another hole,” said John Grotzinger to Universe Today. Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., leads NASA’s Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory mission.

For the second time in three years, U.S. Attorneys have sought to prosecute foreign nationals at NASA on national security grounds, only to dramatically reverse course and shut down their investigations. Most recently, federal prosecutors abruptly ended their case on May 3 against Bo Jiang, a Chinese citizen and former NASA contractor at the agency's Langley Research Center. Jiang had been arrested March 16 when federal agents intercepted him at Dulles International Airport as he tried to board a one-way flight for China. He was carrying two laptops and associated equipment. But in the end, the authorities accepted a plea...

Astronauts on the International Space Station have discovered a leak of ammonia coolant on their orbiting habitat, and NASA is looking into the problem, though it poses no immediate danger to the crew, officials said today (May 9). The space station uses chilled liquid ammonia to cool down the power systems on its eight giant solar array panels. A minor leak of this ammonia was first noticed in 2007, and NASA has been studying the issue ever since. In November 2012 two astronauts took a spacewalk to fix the problem, rewiring some coolant lines and installing a spare radiator due...

<p>Setting foot on Mars by the 2030s is human destiny and a US priority, and every dollar available must be spent on bridging gaps in knowledge on how to get there, NASA's chief said Monday.</p> <p>Addressing a conference of space experts at George Washington University, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that despite hard economic times the United States is committed to breaking new boundaries in space exploration.</p>

WASHINGTON -- A NASA-led modeling study provides new evidence that global warming may increase the risk for extreme rainfall and drought. The study shows for the first time how rising carbon dioxide concentrations could affect the entire range of rainfall types on Earth. Analysis of computer simulations from 14 climate models indicates wet regions of the world, such as the equatorial Pacific Ocean and Asian monsoon regions, will see increases in heavy precipitation because of warming resulting from projected increases in carbon dioxide levels. Arid land areas outside the tropics and many regions with moderate rainfall could become drier. The...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA is paying $424 million more to Russia to get U.S. astronauts into space, and the agency's leader is blaming Congress for the extra expense. NASA announced its latest contract with the Russian Space Agency on Tuesday. The $424 million represents flights to and from the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, as well as training, for six astronauts in 2016 and the first half of 2017. That's $70.6 million per seat -- well above the previous price tag of about $65 million. Russia currently provides the only means of getting people to and from...

Bracing for “significant impacts” to funding for public outreach programs next year, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided to cancel its hugely popular open house in June. The cost savings? Roughly $400,000 for the two-day event. The figure is a comparatively slim sum for an agency that deals with budgets into the billions, but comes as NASA faces pressure to cut costs where it can amid the across-the-board federal spending reductions known as sequestration. It was that downward pressure that JPL cited when it announced last week that the open house scheduled for June 8 and 9 would be canceled to...

Explanation: What spacecraft is humanity currently using to explore our Solar System? Presently, every inner planet has at least one robotic explorer, while several others are monitoring our Sun, some are mapping Earth's Moon, a few are chasing asteroids and comets, one is orbiting Saturn, and several are even heading out into deep space. The above illustration gives more details, with the inner Solar System depicted on the upper right and the outer Solar System on the lower left. Given the present armada, our current epoch might become known as the time when humanity first probed its own star system....

NASA is blaming Congress for the need to pay $424 million more to Russia to get U.S. astronauts into space. NASA announced its latest contract with the Russian Space Agency on Tuesday. The $424 million represents flights to and from the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, as well as training, for six astronauts in 2016 and 2017. That’s $70.6 million per seat—well above the previous price tag of about $63 million. …

Possible that this has been on here before but it's a nice remeberance of what once was despite the enormous costs. It paid my bills for 36+ years so thanks to all you taxpayers. Hell, I even paid myself some of it.

The team in charge of successfully landing NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., received the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's highest group honor at a dinner in Washington on Wednesday night, April 24. The 2013 Trophy for Current Achievement honors outstanding achievements in the fields of aerospace science and technology. The Mars Science Laboratory Project built and operates the rover Curiosity, which has been investigating past and current environments in Gale Crater on the Red Planet since its dramatic sky-crane landing in August 2012. The rover has 10 science instruments to investigate whether...

It’s the job of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory to keep an eye on the sun, a job the SDO has presented in a new video showing off three years’ worth of solar activity. “In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle,” NASA said in a release. The observatory captures an image of the sun every 12 seconds and does so on 10 different wave lengths...

The video above was created by stitching together two of those images per day over a three-year period. The images in the video were taken in the extreme ultraviolet range and represent solar material at temperatures of about 600,000 Kelvin. Each image is displayed for two frames. That spinning motion you see is the sun's 25-day rotation, and over the course of the video, you should be able to see solar activity grow as the sun nears the pinnacle of its 11-year solar cycle. At the 00:30 mark and at 2:28 you can spot a partial eclipse of the sun...

A U.S. spaceflight company is hoping the third time's the charm in order to launch a brand-new rocket into space on its maiden flight today (April 21). After two delayed launched attempts, the privately built Antares rocket is once again poised to blast off from a seaside pad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Liftoff is set for 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT). You can watch the Antares rocket launch live on SPACE.com beginning 4:30 p.m. ET (2030 GMT), courtesy of NASA's webcast.

A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth's atmosphere. NASA's Langley Research Center has collated data proving that “greenhouse gases” actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. The data was collected by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry, (or SABER). SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances thought to be playing...

The search for Earthlike, habitable planets beyond the Sun has been something like a boulder rolling downhill ever since the Kepler space telescope went into orbit in 2009. Before that, ground-based astronomers had been finding so-called exoplanets one or two at a time, here and there in the cosmos, and pretty much all of them were far too large to be hospitable, or much close to the fires of their parent stars, or, usually, both. -snip- Nobody quite imagined what the Kepler team has just announced, however. Writing in Nature, William Borucki, Kepler’s principal scientist, along with dozens of collaborators,...

On one of Virginia's small barrier islands, a NASA facility that operates in relative obscurity outside scientific circles is preparing to be thrust into the spotlight. On Wednesday, Orbital Sciences Corp. plans to conduct the first test launch of its Antares rocket under a NASA program in which private companies deliver supplies to the International Space Station. If all goes as planned, the unmanned rocket's practice payload will be vaulted into orbit from Wallops Island before burning up in the atmosphere on its return to Earth several months later.... A successful launch would pave the way for Dulles-based Orbital to...

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. (AP) — On one of Virginia's small barrier islands, a NASA facility that operates in relative obscurity outside scientific circles is preparing to be thrust into the spotlight. On Wednesday, Orbital Sciences Corp. plans to conduct the first test launch of its Antares rocket under a NASA program in which private companies deliver supplies to the International Space Station. If all goes as planned, the unmanned rocket's practice payload will be vaulted into orbit from Wallops Island before burning up in the atmosphere on its return to Earth several months later. The goal of the launch isn't...

There’s no money to run White House tours, but apparently there’s money to pull one of Al’s pet projects out of mothballs. Satellite shelved after 2000 election to now fly By SETH BORENSTEIN WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush. Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that’s been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took...

The exploration team used Remotely Operated Vehicles to find the engines, which sat on the ocean floor, more than 14,000 feet below sea level. Bezos described the experience as "otherworldly," noting the engines' burial site was eerily similar to space: a feeling of microgravity and a seemingly endless black horizon. After decades of exposure to the ocean's harsh conditions, the engines are corroded, and many are missing the original serial numbers. This will make the identification process more difficult. Bezos will work with NASA to restore two of the F-1 engines' hardware and prevent further corrosion. They will eventually go...

America won’t be repeating that historic one small step anytime soon -- not according to NASA chief Charlie Bolden, anyway. “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” Bolden told a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington last week, according to Jeff Foust of SpacePolitics.com. “And the reason is, we can only do so many things.”

Climate Change: The man who once compared coal trains to Nazi boxcars headed to crematoria leaves government service to fight what he calls the "pipeline to disaster" and promote his brand of climate quackery. In 2007, Dr. James Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but, in his words, "as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pa., on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species." Hansen told the board, "If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains...

NASA administrator Charles Bolden has dismissed the idea that the space agency will attempt another manned Moon mission. Speaking with contemporaries, Bolden said "NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission... probably in my lifetime." Bolden added that if the next administration reverses NASA's decision it would set back the manned space program in its entirety. He warned that, should we divert resources towards a manned moon mission in the future, we would probably never "see Americans on the Moon, on Mars, near an asteroid, or anywhere" in our lifetimes, explaining that "we cannot continue to change...

NASA administrator Charles Bolden has dismissed the idea that the space agency will attempt another manned Moon mission. Speaking with contemporaries, Bolden said "NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission... probably in my lifetime." Bolden added that if the next administration reverses NASA's decision it would set back the manned space program in its entirety. He warned that, should we divert resources towards a manned moon mission in the future, we would probably never "see Americans on the Moon, on Mars, near an asteroid, or anywhere" in our lifetimes, explaining that "we cannot continue to change...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A top senator says President Barack Obama and NASA are planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon. Then astronauts would explore it in 2021. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida said the plan would speed up by four years the existing mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by bringing the space rock closer to Earth. Nelson, who is chairman of the Senate Science and Space Subcommittee, said Friday that Obama is putting $100 million for the accelerated asteroid mission in the 2014 budget that comes out next week....

In an effort to avoid problems caused by interference, NASA will temporarily limit scientific observations by its Mars rovers and orbiters beginning Thursday as the Red Planet passes behind the sun as seen from Earth. The sun will appear between Earth and Mars throughout the month of April in a setup known as a Mars solar conjunction, which can interfere with communications between the two planets. Specifically, during these solar conjunctions, solar flares and charged particles being emitted from the sun can disrupt radio communications, and thus could interfere with the stream of data being sent back and forth to...

Crowdfunding for NASA – in a round about way. Unknown to most people, NASA is barred from purchasing advertising. Recently a campaign on Indiegogo was launched to purchase a trailer to run prior to the next Star Trek film which will soon be in theaters across the country. As quoted from the campaign; "When the Space Shuttle landed for the last time, many Americans thought NASA was closed for good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Right now, men and women from the space program are designing and building next generation space vehicles to go to new destinations in...

I checked first, thinking this was some April Fools joke, it appears legit. (h/t to Tom Nelson and Skiphil)Climate Alarmist Jim Hansen leaving NASA on Wed. to devote himself to legal and political activism:Hansen retiring from NASA to press legal and activist efforts At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted...

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! NASA’s James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a controversial and highly vocal voice of alarm about the planet’s changing climate, will retire as the director of the space institute, NASA announced Tuesday -- and plans to immediately sue his former employer. Hansen will step down from his $180,000 a year position to join a number of lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments for their failure to police industry over man’s effect on the climate, the New York Times reported. Hansen was clearly aware of the irony....

James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, will retire from NASA this week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases. Science Times Podcast Marveling at the efficiency of a killer in the skies and NASA’s household name on climate change takes his fight for the earth’s future into retirement. His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.

I loathe having to write this story because I truly dislike giving any attention to the people who are known as the “slayers” from the “Slaying the Sky Dragon” book. They now operate under the moniker of “Principia Scientific”.But, somebody has to do it because some really bad mangling of the intent of a NASA press release by the “slayers” group is getting some traction. They have completely misread the NASA study and reinterpreted it for their purpose, claiming in a story titled “New Discovery: NASA Study Proves Carbon Dioxide Cools Atmosphere” : NASA’s Langley Research Center has collated data...

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Message to the future

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) today expressed deep concern about the U.S. government’s new restrictions on travel and conference attendance for federally funded scientists. Enacted in response to the budget sequestration that went into effect on March 1st, the policies severely limit the ability of many researchers to meet with collaborators and to present their latest results at professional meetings. The leadership of the AAS is especially worried about the restrictions’ deleterious effects on scientific productivity and on scientists’ and students’ careers.The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo on February 27th offering guidance to federal agencies on...

WASHINGTON – Thirty-five years after its launch, Voyager 1 appears to have travelled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, according to a new study appearing online today. The heliosphere is a region of space dominated by the Sun and its wind of energetic particles, and which is thought to be enclosed, bubble-like, in the surrounding interstellar medium of gas and dust that pervades the Milky Way galaxy. On August 25, 2012, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft measured drastic changes in radiation levels, more than 11 billion miles from the Sun. Anomalous cosmic rays, which are cosmic rays...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA chief Charles Bolden has advice on how to handle a large asteroid headed toward New York City: Pray. That's about all the United States - or anyone for that matter - could do at this point about unknown asteroids and meteors that may be on a collision course with Earth, Bolden told lawmakers at a U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee hearing on Tuesday. An asteroid estimated to be have been about 55 feet in diameter exploded on February 15 over Chelyabinsk, Russia, generating shock waves that shattered windows and damaged buildings. More than...

CAPE CANAVERAL -- An Atlas V rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying an Air Force satellite into orbit Tuesday afternoon, against a bright blue sky. The Space-Based Infrared System Geosynchronous (SBIRS GEO-2) satellite, numbered 2 because it will be the second of its kind, is designed to help the military spot incoming missiles. The GEO-1 satellite launched in May 2011. The SBIRS program addresses critical warfighter needs in the areas of missile warning, missile defense, technical intelligence and battlespace characterization.

On Tuesday's "Mornings on the Mall" on WMAL-FM in Washington DC, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) revealed that it was the Obama Administration that allowed hundreds of Chinese nationals to work in a sensitive area of NASA's Langley Research Center. One of the nationals was arrested Monday at Dulles airport as he was trying to leave the country when he failed to disclose all of the electronics he was taking with him. An affidavit says Bo Jiang was under investigation for possible violations of the Arms Control Export Act and that he had previously taken a NASA laptop to China that...

Rising above the present location of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, higher than any mountain in the 48 contiguous states of the United States, Mount Sharp is featured in new imagery from the rover. > A pair of mosaics assembled from dozens of telephoto images shows Mount Sharp in dramatic detail. The component images were taken by the 100-millimeter-focal-length telephoto lens camera mounted on the right side of Curiosity's remote sensing mast, during the 45th Martian day of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 20, 2012). This layered mound, also called Aeolis Mons, in the center of Gale Crater rises more...

Explanation: Planetary nebulae can look simple, round, and planet-like in small telescopes. But images from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope have become well known for showing these fluorescent gas shrouds of dying Sun-like stars to possess a staggering variety of detailed symmetries and shapes. This composite color Hubble image of NGC 6751, the Glowing Eye Nebula, is a beautiful example of a classic planetary nebula with complex features. It was selected in April of 2000 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Hubble in orbit, but was reprocessed recently by an amateur as part of the Hubble Legacy program. Winds and...

Officials at NASA's Langley Research Center permitted a contractor to hire a Chinese national affiliated with an organization designated by U.S. national security agencies as an "entity of concern," and then allowed the individual access to classified information, according to Rep. Frank Wolf. - snip-Wolf said during a Capitol Hill news conference today that "at least several dozen other Chinese nationals," are employed at Langley, and he charged that they are employed in a manner to "circumvent" congressional bans on Chinese involvement at NASA facilities.

I’m feeling a little disjointed today, butt It’s Saturday! That means it’s time for my spankin’ new feature: Saturday Sequester Survival Stories. Harrowing tales of real people who survived the R-word’s sequester! First on the docket, Pet Care. I don’t know about you, butt the Wons are just too busy Organizing for Action and shrinking children's’ fat behinds to feed and walk their dog. Little Bo’s “security” could stand to visit the salad bar every so often Sure, I know Big Guy drops the old “got to go scoop the poop” canard when he wants out of some boring fundraiser...

'Something unexpected' is happening on the Sun, Nasa has warned. This year was supposed to be the year of 'solar maximum,' the peak of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But as this image reveals, solar activity is relatively low.

A ring of radiation previously unknown to science fleetingly surrounded Earth last year before being virtually annihilated by a powerful interplanetary shock wave, scientists say. NASA’s twin Van Allen space probes, which are studying the Earth’s radiation belts, made the cosmic find. The surprising discovery—a new, albeit temporary, radiation belt around Earth—reveals how much remains unknown about outer space, even those regions closest to the planet, researchers added. …

30 Seconds To Mars launch new single into space 'Up In The Air' is travelling to the International Space Station with thanks to NASA Earlier today (March 1), the first copy of 'Up In The Air' was launched from Cape Canaveral to the International Space Station in the SpaceX Dragon Cargo Capsule. The single is set for release on March 19. 30 Seconds To Mars were in Florida to watch the galactic launch of the single, which is being transported by the Falcon 9 rocket, alongside in excess of 1,200 pounds of scientific experiments and cargo. For more information on...

A four-year FBI investigation into the transfer of classified weapons technology to China and other countries from NASA’s Ames Research Center is being stonewalled by government officials, sources tell FoxNews.com. Documents obtained by FoxNews.com, which summarize these and other allegations and were given to congressional sources last week by a whistle-blower, described how a “secret grand jury” was to be convened in February 2011 to hear testimony from informants in the case, including a senior NASA engineer. But federal prosecutor Gary Fry was removed from the case, which was then transferred from one office in the Northern District of California...

US astronomers looking for life in the solar system believe that Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which has an ocean, is much more promising than desert-covered Mars, which is currently the focus of the US government's attention. "Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to possess .... life," said Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "And it is the place we should be exploring now that we have a concept mission we think is the right one to get there for an affordable cost," he...