Teaming With Bots!

The Geminid meteor shower is back and will peak on Sunday and Monday this week. It’s supposed to be one of the most promising events of the year with roughly 50 shooting stars an hour. How, when and where to watch the spectacular event.

Microsoft Creates Emotion Recognition Tool. Upload Your Image and Give It a Try

Project Oxford is Microsoft’s collection of machine-learning application programming interfaces (APIs). Now the tech giant can add emotion recognition to its API portfolio.

Note: This one was also a little off. I tried to give it an easy one (surprise). But apparently, Project Oxford thinks that I am judgy and filled with scorn.

Read more at: http://futurism.com/links/microsoft-creates-emotion-recognition-tool-upload-your-image-and-give-it-a-try/

Hitchhiking a Ride to Space

Have you ever packed for a long trip with a friend and ran out of space in your suitcase? Maybe your friend was nice and let your spare items hitchhike a ride in their bag?  The following science experiments are doing something similar on our Space Launch System rocket.

Our Space Launch System (SLS) will be the most powerful rocket we’ve ever built and will enable astronauts in the Orion spacecraft to travel deeper into the solar system. This advanced launch vehicle will launch astronauts to an asteroid and eventually to Mars, while opening new possibilities for other payloads including robotic scientific missions to places like Mars, Saturn and Jupiter.

The primary goal of SLS and the Orion spacecraft is to launch future crewed, deep space missions. That said, an added bonus of this powerful rocket is the extra science it can carry. On it’s first mission (known as Exploration Mission-1, EM-1) SLS will carry 13 CubeSats (small satellites, each the size of a large shoebox) on its first flight as secondary payloads. These small satellites will perform various in-space experiments. In a way, these 13 CubeSats are ‘space hitchhikers’, catching a ride to deep space where they can gather data valuable to future exploration missions.

How were these 13 experiments selected? Great question. They were selected through a series of announcements of flight opportunities, a public contest and negations with our international partners.

These secondary payloads have a vast array of functions, from taking pictures of asteroids, to using yeast to detect impacts of deep-space radiation. Each month we will highlight one of these experiments on Tumblr and talk about all the exciting science they will do. Just to give you an idea of what these shoebox-sized satellites will do, we’ll give you a preview:

1. NEA Scout

NEA Scout, stands for: Near-Earth Asteroid Scout. This CubeSat will investigate an asteroid, taking pictures and observe its position in space.

2. BioSentinel

BioSentinel will be the first time living organisms have traveled to deep space in more than 40 years. It will use yeast to detect, measure and compare the impact of deep-space radiation on living organisms over long durations in deep space.

3. Lunar Flashlight

This experiment will look for ice deposits and identify locations where resources may be extracted from the lunar surface. It will demonstrate the capability to scout for useful materials and resources from lunar orbit.

4. Skyfire

Lockheed Martin’s Skyfire will perform a lunar flyby, collecting data to address both Moon and Mars Strategic Knowledge Gaps, or gaps in information required to reduce risk, increase effectiveness and improve the design of robotic and human space exploration missions, for surface characterization, remote sensing and site selection.

5. Lunar IceCube

Morehead State University’s Lunar IceCube will look for water in ice, liquid and vapor forms from a very low orbit of only 62 miles above the surface of the moon. The ability to search for useful resources can potentially help astronauts manufacture fuel and necessities to sustain a crew.

6. CuSP

The CubeSat mission to study Solar Particles, or CuSP, will be the first protype of an interplanetary CubeSat space weather station. It will observe space weather events hours before they reach Earth.

7. Luna-H-Map

Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH) will enter a polar orbit around the moon with a low altitude. From there, it will produce maps of near-surface hydrogen.

8, 9, 10. Three Tournament Payloads

Three of the payloads riding along on this journey will be the winners of the Ground Tournaments portion of our CubeQuest Challenge. This challenge is designed to foster innovation in small spacecraft propulsion and communications techniques. Learn more about this challenge HERE.

11, 12, 13. International Partners

The remaining three payloads are reserved for international partners, and will be announced at a later time.

To stay updated on these experiments, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/launching-science-and-technology.html

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

This time in 2009, a bat hitched a ride on the space shuttle Discovery

Never forget the Batstronaut.

On 15 March 2009, when the space shuttle Discovery was about to launch into orbit, a wounded bat grabbed ahold of its fuel tank to become an officially recognised stowaway, despite safeguards that are supposed to keep such things from happening. He was a bat pioneer hell-bent on glory, or so we choose to believe.

So what exactly happened here? The story started on a mild Sunday evening at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre, as crew members began prepping to launch the STS-119 mission. As the crew made their rounds checking for icy buildup on theDiscovery fuel tanks and whatnot, they were shocked to find a small free tail bat clinging to the tank’s foam insulation.

“Based on images and video, a wildlife expert who provides support to the centre said the small creature was a free tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its right shoulder or wrist,” NASA explained. Unfortunately, it did not appear to be wearing a tiny spacesuit at the time.

XKCD has been tapped to teach high schoolers science

What if your most fearsome high school subjects like physics, chemistry and biology could be explained in humorous stick-figure drawings? That is exactly what textbook giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hopes to do by hiring 31-year-old artist and XKCD creator Randall Munroe to illustrate lessons. But wait, the collaboration gets even better for students.

Follow @the-future-now​

This glorious map helps you keep track of every space mission in the Solar System

We’ve come so far.

Space exploration is pretty amazing right now. Just yesterday, we launched the ExoMars 2016 spacecraft, which will hunt for signs of life on Mars, and by now, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is likely way out in interstellar space. NASA recently announced that it plans to visit Europa, one of the most promising candidates in our Solar System to host life, and even NASA’s chief scientist thinks we’ll find alien life within 20 to 30 years, as long as we keep exploring.

But how do you keep track of all these awesome space missions? To help out,the guys at Pop Chart Lab have created this beautiful poster showing our space exploration to date. It spans all the way from 1959 to 2015, and features over 100 exploratory probes, landers, and rovers.

As you can see on the poster below, the majority of our machines never leave Earth’s orbit. There are a whole lot of crowded lines near our planet, each of which belongs to a space probe or explorer of some kind. But as you get further from Earth, there are less and less of these brave explorers, and you get to see just how far humanity has travelled into our Solar System.

Wow. NASA has released some amazing images of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus.

Mars Pathfinder & Sojourner Rover (360 View) Explained

Thanks to new technology, we can take a 360-degree tour of the 1997 Pathfinder mission landing site, including Sojourner, the first Mars rover. Check out this interactive YouTube panorama, and then…

…keep scrolling to find out more about each point of interest, how the Pathfinder mission compares to “The Martian” and NASA’s real Journey to Mars.

Yogi

“Yogi” is a meter-size rock about 5 meters northwest of the Mars Pathfinder lander and the second rock visited by the Sojourner Rover’s alpha proton X-ray spectrometer (APXS) instrument. This mosaic shows super resolution techniques applied to help to address questions about the texture of this rock and what it might tell us about how it came to be.

Twin Peaks

The Twin Peaks are modest-size hills to the southwest of the Mars Pathfinder landing site. They were discovered on the first panoramas taken by the IMP camera on the July 4, 1997, and subsequently identified in Viking Orbiter images taken over 20 years ago. They’re about 30-35 meters tall.

Barnacle Bill

“Barnacle Bill” is a small rock immediately west-northwest of the Mars Pathfinder lander and was the first rock visited by the Sojourner Rover’s alpha proton X-ray spectrometer (APXS) instrument. If you have some old-school red-cyan glasses, put them on and see this pic in eye-popping 3-D.

Rock Garden

The Rock Garden is a cluster of large, angular rocks tilted in a downstream direction from ancient floods on Mars. The rocky surface is comprised of materials washed down from the highlands and deposited in this ancient outflow channel.

MOAR INFO

Pathfinder Lander & Sojourner Rover 

Mission Facts [PDF]

Science Results

Rock & Soil Types

This vista was stitched together from many images taken in 1997 by Pathfinder.

Pathfinder and Sojourner figure into Mark Watney’s quest for survival on the Red Planet in the book and movie, “The Martian.” See JPL’s role in making “The Martian” a reality: http://go.nasa.gov/1McRrXw and discover nine real NASA technologies depicted in “The Martian”: http://go.nasa.gov/1QiyUiC.

So what about the real-life “Journey to Mars”? NASA is developing the capabilities needed to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. Discover more at http://nasa.gov/journeytomars and don’t forget to visit me when you make it to the Red Planet. Until then, stay curious and I’ll see you online.

What’s Up for March 2016?

In March, Jupiter, it’s moons and moon shadows will all be visible in the sky. Find out when and where to look up:

Jupiter dominates the evening sky this month, rising at sunset and setting at dawn. On March 8, Jupiter reaches what is called “opposition”. Imagine that Jupiter and the sun are at opposite ends of a straight line, with the Earth in between. This brings Jupiter its closest to Earth, so it shines brighter and appears larger in telescopes.

On the nights of March 14 – 15, March 21 – 22 and March 29, two of Jupiter’s moons will cross the planet’s disk. 

When the planet is at opposition and the sun shines on Jupiter’s moons, we can see the moon’s shadow crossing the planet. There are actually 11 of these double shadow transits in March!

The next six months will be awesome times for you to image Jupiter when it’s highest in the sky; near midnight now, and a little earlier each night through the late summer.

Even through the smallest telescopes or binoculars, you should be able to see the two prominent belts on each side of Jupiter’s equator made up of the four Galilean moons: Io, Europa Ganymede and Calisto. If you have a good enough view, you may even see Jupiter’s Red Spot!

Our Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter on July 4th of this year and will go into orbit around the giant planet. Right now, the Juno mission science team is actively seeking amateur and professional images of the planet. These images are uploaded to a Juno website, and the public is invited to discuss points of interest in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Locations will later be voted on and the favorites will be targets for JunoCam, the spacecraft’s imaging camera. Once JunoCam has taken the images, they’ll be posted online. Imaging participants can then process these raw mission images and re-upload them for others to view.  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Hi guys! I was inspired to make this post by all of the messages I’ve gotten from people asking me to either tag or stop posting images of spiders all together. And as someone who used to be absolutely mortified by any 8-legged creature, I can see where you are all coming from!  I used to have a bedroom in the attic, a musky basement, an exotic plant and flower garden, and lots of wood piles. So it’s no wonder that I was confronted with spiders of all shapes and sizes. Ranging from the wolf spider, the brown recluse, cellar spiders, and all kinds of orbweavers. Spiders are incredibly important to our ecosystem, and without them we would suffer. They are incredibly complex and fascinating little creatures that, whether we like it or not, are going to cross our path. What helped me come over my fear the most was simply taking the time to learn about them.

1.) You swallow spiders in your sleep: FALSE. Might as well start with the one we’ve all heard! There would have to be so many unlikely circumstances for this to happen that it’s pretty implausible. Most spider species prefer to stay in their webs, while others hunt no where near humans. Beds don’t offer prey so they likely won’t crawl into them intentionally, unless you have other bugs in your bed for whatever reason. Spiders already could care less about us, they definitely won’t be crawling into a moist, slumbering and snoring human mouth.  2.) Two puncture marks means a spider bite: FALSE. Spiders do have two venom-injecting fangs that they usually use at the same time when biting. However, any spider smaller than a tarantula will leave bites so small that there will be no identifiable separation, if a mark is even left at all. When you have two bites right next to each other, it’s probably from a different bloodsucking insect that has bitten you twice.  3.) Daddy Long Legs have the most powerful venom, but its fangs are too small to bite you: FALSE. This is another wildly accepted urban legend with no fact behind it whatsoever. Depending on where you’re from, you may have a different idea of what a Daddy Long Leg is. To some it is a Harvestman while to others it is a Crane Fly; both have no venom! To others it is a Pholcid House Spider, which does have venom, however it is extremely weak.  4.) You’re always within 3 feet of a spider: FALSE. There’s actually some history behind this one! According to an article from the Burke Museum, it started in 1995 when a famous arachnologist stated, “Wherever you sit as you read these lines, a spider is probably no more than a few yards away.“ Throughout the years this line as been repeated with the distance becoming shorter and shorter. In reality, nobody can really say how far you are from a spider at any time. Just remember that spiders don’t really care about you are are likely to ignore you and go about their business.  5.) Spiders can lay their eggs under human skin through their bites: FALSE. First of all, spiders do not find the human body suitable for egg laying. However there are tons of stories claiming that someone’s “friend” had it occur to them (usually by a brown recluse, which prefer to stay far away from humans as their name suggests). Spiders simply don’t have the ability to somehow transfer their eggs into their venom. 6.) Any spider species can be found anywhere: FALSE. Just like animals and insects, spiders prefer certain climates to thrive. Therefore this myth is completely false. Besides house spiders, many species have very limited ranges. For more information on spiders in your area, a quick Google search will do you much better. 7.) Spiders found in your home are dangerous: FALSE. Spiders are not bloodsuckers. They have no reason to bite humans or your beloved Fluffy. Rod Crawford, the Curator of Arachnids at The Burke Museum, has been handling thousand of spiders for 44 years. He claims to have been bitten a total of 3 times. The spiders that are typically found in homes do not obtain venom powerful enough to do you any harm.  8.) Spiders come indoors in the fall: FALSE. Arachnophobes may not like this, but, the spiders in your house have likely been there the entire time. Outdoor spider species are not adapted to the indoors, and vice versa with house spider species. Very few spiders you see in your home have ever been outdoors.  9.) Tarantulas are dangerous or deadly to humans: FALSE. Hollywood tends to paint tarantulas as evil beasts who actively seek out humans to bite. In reality, tarantulas are common furry pets who are easily handled. Their venom has very low toxicity to humans. Most people who have been bitten don’t report anything besides a quick “ouch”. The most “dangerous” thing about tarantulas is the hair on their abdomens, which they can flick off and spread into the air. Although, this only causes mild skin rashes and irritation to the eyes and nasal passages. 

1.) There are approximately 38,000 known species of spiders (as of February, 2015). Scientists believe there are still many more to be discovered. 2.)  Spiders are vital to the ecosystem. Most of us know that they eat harmful insects, but they also pollinate plants and recycle dead animals and plants back into the Earth. They are also an essential food source to other small mammals, birds, and fish.  3.) Not all spiders spin webs. However, they all have the ability to produce silk.  4.) Web-weaving spiders have claws at the end of each leg. This enables them to move around their webs without getting stuck! 5.) Spiders have blue blood. 6.) Giant trapdoor spiders are considered living fossils. This is because they are very similar to the spiders that lived 300 million years ago! 7. The world’s biggest spider is the Goliath Spider. It can grow up to 11 inches wide with up to 1 inch long fangs! But don’t worry; it only eats frogs, mice, and other small creatures. 8.) Spiders have an exoskeleton. While us humans have bones that are surrounded by our muscles, spiders have their bones on the outside to protect their muscles on the inside. Which kinda make more sense to me. Grasshoppers, lobsters, and cockroaches are just a few that also have exoskeletons.  9.) Spider legs use hydraulic pressure to move. Their muscles are able to pull their legs inward, but not out again. This requires pumping a watery liquid into the legs to move them back out. This is why dead spiders’ legs are curled in.  10.) Spiders sometimes use a line of silk to “fly” through the air. This is called “ballooning”. You probably remember all but three of Charlotte’s babies did this. 11.) Baby spiders are called spiderlings. Pretty adorable.  12.) Males risk being eaten by the females. Similar to insects, female spiders are usually larger. They tend to eat any small creature that comes along, including the males who just wanna get some. The males attempt to avoid this by plucking strands of the female’s webs or doing a little dance (jumping spiders, who knew they could get more adorable).

Now, I know overcoming fears does not come easily to everyone. It took me quite a while! So I’ve put together some ideas that helped me. Just remember that this may not help everyone. If your fear is complicating every day life it may be best to seek help from a professional. 1.) Watch YouTube videos of spider handlers. This, this step right here, was the most important for me. It all started with this video. This owner cared so much about his spider who was having difficulties molting. He took the time to attempt to help her get it off, and showed a huge amount of grief and compassion as it went on. As someone who used to be scared of spiders, this video showed me a different side. This person loved this spider just like I love my cat. I began watching and subscribing to more and more channels, and found that it helped me a lot. Some channels worth looking at are tarantulaguy1796, TarantulaAddict, Jon3800, and Frankus Lee.  2.) Observe live spiders. If you see a spider in your house or outside, take a deep breath and just watch it for a little bit (at a distance, if you’d prefer). Watch its legs and how it moves, its different body parts and what it seems to be doing. Just watch them. They’re not going to jump on you and start gnawing on your arm like a human corn-on-the-cob, I promise.  3.) Visit spider exhibits. Whether it be at an aquarium, zoo, or museum, take the time to take a walk through the insect and arachnid exhibits. There will often be someone there who knows a lot about them who you can talk to. As mentioned before, the more you learn about them, the less scary they become! 4.) Watch someone handle a spider, or handle one on your own! Okay maybe the second one is a big step to take right now. But a lot of spider handlers may let you touch their legs (which are a lot furrier than you’d think!). However, if you’re too afraid, it’s best to watch from a distance for a while or pay close attention to how the handler holds the spider. The first time I held a spider I was pretty scared, but I was more concerned with dropping it or hurting it. I was amazed at how not-creepy it was and I walked away with an awesome experience. Just remember to keep them away from your face and to wash your hands before and after to keep those pesky hairs from irritating you.  5.) Overall, take it slow. If you need to start with pictures, start with pictures. Then gifs. Then videos. Then live spiders. It’s all up to you. In reality, spiders do not want to bother you. They are not these crazy blood-thirsty creatures that Hollywood and myths make them out to be. Educate yourself and remind yourself how amazing and important these little 8-legged guys are! EDIT: Silly me I totally forgot to include my sources! Fascinating Facts About Spiders Amazing Facts About Spiders Explorit Science Center Rod Crawford Burke Museum Scientific American