Showing 75 posts tagged space
A tapestry of footage tracing the cosmic and biological origins of our species, set to original music.
So so, so many related videos to dive further into these quick clips from MelodySheep. From the archives: the Big Bang, the moon, atoms, evolution, dinosaurs, nature, animals, culture, architecture, technology and space.
via @mamagotcha.
This cosmological simulation follows the development of a single disk galaxy over about 13.5 billion years, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present time. Colors indicate old stars (red), young stars (white and bright blue) and the distribution of gas density (pale blue); the view is 300,000 light-years across. The simulation ran on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and required about 1 million CPU hours. It assumes a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter.
On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled away from the sun at over 900 miles per second.
This movie shows the ejection from a variety of viewpoints as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
Follow this up with this video primer of how SDO, STEREO, and SOHO work together to send us these phenomenal views of the sun’s entire surface and atmosphere.
via io9.com.
The Apollo 15 Hammer-Feather Drop:
At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk, Commander David Scott (pictured above) performed a live demonstration for the television cameras. He held out a geologic hammer and a feather and dropped them at the same time. Because they were essentially in a vacuum, there was no air resistance and the feather fell at the same rate as the hammer, as Galileo had concluded hundreds of years before - all objects released together fall at the same rate regardless of mass. Mission Controller Joe Allen described the demonstration in the “Apollo 15 Preliminary Science Report”:
During the final minutes of the third extravehicular activity, a short demonstration experiment was conducted. A heavy object (a 1.32-kg aluminum geological hammer) and a light object (a 0.03-kg falcon feather) were released simultaneously from approximately the same height (approximately 1.6 m) and were allowed to fall to the surface. Within the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to undergo the same acceleration and strike the lunar surface simultaneously, which was a result predicted by well-established theory, but a result nonetheless reassuring considering both the number of viewers that witnessed the experiment and the fact that the homeward journey was based critically on the validity of the particular theory being tested.
Thanks, @abcoetzee.
Want to see what it looked like for Curiosity as it hurtled toward the surface of Mars? After the heat shield separates, the car-sized rover, still protected by its back shell, continued to fall quickly toward Mars by parachute, until it separated from the back shell and began its powered descent and touchdown (via sky crane) to the ground.
Using footage provided by NASA, Reddit user Godd2 just spent the last four days on behalf of all humankind creating a stunning interpolated HD version of the descent. In layman’s terms interpolation involves taking a choppy video, in this case NASA’s 4 frames-per-second video, and rendering the “missing” frames in between resulting in an incredibly smooth 25 frames-per-second video.
Compared to the more suspenseful Seven Minutes of Terror video, this one is rather majestic, and inspires awe in a completely different way.
From the archives, all things Mars Curiosity.
via This Is Colossal.
