After tracking space shuttle Discovery, a team of NASA is preparing for a new challenge. The team wants to have earthquake prediction. They are going to use the Global Positioning System (GPS) for this purpose.
You might remember about the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003. That accident took the lives of seven astronauts. Accidents like this have pressed the need for safer spacecrafts. Designers have been working on this issue ever since. And, former NASA astronaut and space transport company SpaceX owner Garrett Reisman is planning to build the world’s safest spacecraft.
Last week on Tuesday afternoon, Texas became a victim of few tornadoes. The tornadoes were such dangerous and devastating that had never happened in Texas before. NASA has revealed some stunning 3D images of the 14 confirmed tornadoes that devastated different parts of Texas last week. The images reveal some unbelievable tornadoes. These tornadoes had great powerful thunderstorms more than eight miles high. The thunderstorms destroyed several neighborhoods to the ground.
Looks like the movie ‘Iron Man’ inspired both National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and General Motors. (GM) NASA and GM are working together on a robotic glove that can help working with your hands much easily. Officially they call this gloves the ‘Human Grasp Assist Device.’ It is also known as ‘K-glove’ or ‘Robo-glove.’ By using a tool, Robo-glove reduces the amount of force while applied. It means, it decreases the chance of repetitive stress injuries. This glove is especially made for astronauts and engineers.
Because there’s so much talk around hacker activity, here’s another bit of information from the same sphere. NASA seems to be one of the most popular destinations for hacker “vacations”. Apparently the agency had to deal with 5,408 security lapses in 2010 and 2011. The most alarming breach is dated back to March 2011 when a certain laptop containing the algorithms that were used to command the International Space Station (ISS) went missing, never to be seen again.
A few weeks ago, White House announced that it will be cutting down on the funding to the space agency, NASA. This causes quite a debate since NASA has been making valuable progress regarding it’s research about Mars. Now, it has been learnt that NASA is cutting it’s budget from other projects so that it could muster the hefty expenses it would require for Mars missions during this decade. Despite the cuts in funding, NASA seems determined to go forth with it’s Mars-centric approach.
Since 1960 before humans walked on the moon, IBM was one of the biggest (might be the only one) mainframes that was cutting-edge machines for scientific and engineering calculations. In fact, since then, NASA had been using these mainframes too. But to keep pace with modern rules, technology and high-performance technical computing effort, NASA decides to shut down its old main frame Marshall Space Flight Center and preparing to set up with the new and latest technologies and mainframes.
Finally, NASA‘s next generation rocket J-2X successfully passed its one of the most Vital Tests ‘Firing up Rocket Engine’ from its Launchpad. Last Wednesday, Nov 9, an experiment of 500 seconds were made by NASA’s Engineer, at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi to achieve the Flight Certification. It’s especially designed to be placed for Upper Stage in NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS).