Tag Archives: Space

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Film & Movies, Memories & History, Pleasures, Television

Make it so! Star Trek: The Next Generation remains radically hopeful television | Television | The Guardian

By Paul Verhoeven, Tue 11 Apr 2023 11.00 EDT

An enterprising crew: Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Denise Crosby as Tasha Yar, Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi and John de Lancie as Q in the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Photograph: CBS

In the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World, Wayne Campbell makes a wise observation about the comparisons made between sparkling wine and champagne. “It is a lot like Star Trek: The Next Generation,” he notes of sparkling wine. “In many ways it’s superior, but will never be as recognized as the original.”

Wayne was right about many things, but even he couldn’t have foreseen the cultural impact of Next Gen from his vantage point in 1992.

The original Star Trek series, starring the likes of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, was great, and the Star Trek films were intermittently so too – all following a crew of spacefaring idealists exploring the universe and having velure-ensconced adventures. But in 1987 the story of Star Trek recommenced with a new series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which skipped a century ahead and charted a fascinating new course with an all new crew on a new and improved USS Enterprise, a ship with a continuing mission to explore the universe under the steady hand of the uptight but charming Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart).

Source: Make it so! Star Trek: The Next Generation remains radically hopeful television | Television | The Guardian

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing, Web & Technology

Dan Levitt’s ‘What’s Gotten Into You’ traces atoms’ long trip from the big bang to the human body | CNN

By Bryn Nelson, CNN, Published 10:17 AM EST, Sun January 22, 2023

We are ever-changing and replacing old parts with new ones: our water, proteins and even cells.
Faisal/Adobe Stock

In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that ejected the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect.

Dan Levitt’s book, “What’s Gotten Into You,” reconstructs the journey of our atoms across billions of years.

Later, it morphed from a watery expanse to a giant snowball that nearly snuffed out all existing life.

Source: Dan Levitt’s ‘What’s Gotten Into You’ traces atoms’ long trip from the big bang to the human body | CNN

Current Affairs, Memories & History, Politics, Science & Health

NASA creates team to study UFOs – CNN

By Katie Hunt and Ashley Strickland, CNN, Updated 3:20 PM ET, Thu June 9, 2022

from article…

(CNN) NASA is putting a team together to study unidentified aerial phenomena, popularly known as UFOs, the US space agency said Thursday.

The team will gather data on “events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena — from a scientific perspective,” the agency said.

Key lawmaker warns at UFO hearing: ‘Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat’ Key lawmaker warns at UFO hearing: ‘Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat’

NASA said it was interested in UAPs from a security and safety perspective. There was no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, NASA added. The study will begin this fall and is expected to take nine months.

“NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

Source: NASA creates team to study UFOs – CNN

Books & Reading, Science & Health

Astronomers Gear Up to Grapple with the High-Tension Cosmos – Scientific American

A debate over conflicting measurements of key cosmological properties is set to shape the next decade of astronomy and astrophysics

By Anil Ananthaswamy, April 18, 2022

Atacama Cosmology Telescope at Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Credit: Giulio Ercolani/Alamy Stock Photo

How fast is the universe expanding? How much does matter clump up in our cosmic neighborhood? Different methods of answering these two questions—either by observing the early cosmos and extrapolating to present times, or by making direct observations of the nearby universe—are yielding consistently different answers.

The simplest explanation for these discrepancies is merely that our measurements are somehow erroneous, but researchers are increasingly entertaining another, more breathtaking possibility: These twin tensions—between expectation and observation, between the early and late universe—may reflect some deep flaw in the standard model of cosmology, which encapsulates our knowledge and assumptions about the universe.

Finding and fixing that flaw, then, could profoundly transform our understanding of the cosmos.

Source: Astronomers Gear Up to Grapple with the High-Tension Cosmos – Scientific American

Science & Health, Web & Technology

NASA SPHEREx Mission: Finalized Plans for a Cutting-Edge Cosmic Mapmaker | SciTechDaily

By Jet Propulsion Laboratory, March 26, 2022

From article…

NASA’s upcoming SPHEREx mission will be able to scan the entire sky every six months and create a map of the cosmos unlike any before.

Scheduled to launch no later than April 2025, it will probe what happened within the first second after the big bang, how galaxies form and evolve, and the prevalence of molecules critical to the formation of life, like water, locked away as ice in our galaxy.

YouTube video…

Achieving these goals will require cutting-edge technology, and NASA has this month approved final plans for all the observatory’s components.

Source: NASA SPHEREx Mission: Finalized Plans for a Cutting-Edge Cosmic Mapmaker

Film & Movies, Memories & History, Web & Technology

60 Years Ago: Astronaut John Glenn, the First American to Orbit the Earth Aboard Friendship 7 | SciTechDaily | Space News

By John Uri, NASA Johnson Space Center, February 21, 2022

A few days before launch, Glenn, right, watches as artist Cecilia “Cece” Bibby paints the name “Friendship 7” on his capsule. Credit: NASA

In February 1962, the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing. Both nations had developed spacecraft to send humans into space and selected a group of pilots to fly those spacecraft.

The Soviets leaped ahead by placing the first man, Yuri A. Gagarin, in space on April 12, 1961, on a one-orbit flight around the Earth aboard his Vostok spaceship. The United States responded with two suborbital piloted Mercury missions, launched atop Redstone rockets.

Via YouTube…

The Soviets next kept a cosmonaut in space for a full day. On February 20, 1962, astronaut John H. Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth during the three-orbit Mercury-Atlas 6 mission, aboard the spacecraft he named Friendship 7.

Source: 60 Years Ago: Astronaut John Glenn, the First American to Orbit the Earth Aboard Friendship 7