Gadgets Blog

What's missing from this picture on this iPad app's "landing page"? Pluto, Ceres, and Vesta for starters. NASA has missions on their way to these worlds (Dawn and New Horizons). But it does show the ISS (which is not a planet or a moon). Whether you think Pluto, Ceres, and Vesta are planets or dwarf planets or something else, they are the destinations for major missions and deserve to be on this front page. Not to do so is to ignore a billion dollar's worth of hardware and science. I wonder who reviews these apps prior to release? More below.

NASA is challenging high school teams to design software to program small satellites aboard the International Space Station. The competition centers on the Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES.

ESA: Nearing the end of its third month of continuous operation, the International Space Station's ship-tracking experiment has experienced a marked increase in data quality. Now it operates along with a dedicated satellite carrying the same receiver.

Idle computers are the astronomers' playground: Three citizen scientists--an American couple and a German--have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries. This is the first genuine astronomical discovery by a public volunteer distributed computing project. The details of their discovery and the process of getting there are revealed in a paper published in the Aug. 12 edition of Science Express.

"To understand the thinking that led to the design of the Star Trek PADD, we spoke to some of the people involved in production of ST:TNG (as well as other Star Trek TV series and films), including Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler. All three were involved in various aspects of production art for Star Trek properties, including graphic design, set design, prop design, visual effects, art direction, and more. We also discussed their impressions of the iPad and how eerily similar it is to their vision of 24th century technology, how science fiction often influences technology, and what they believe is the future of human-machine interaction." More at Ars Technica

Cocooned inside an aluminum frame and foam blocks cut out to its shape, Robonaut 2, or R2, is heading to the International Space Station inside the Permanent Multipurpose Module in space shuttle Discovery's payload bay as part of the STS-133 mission.

The ongoing collaboration between entrepreneurial space firm Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation and Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) reached a notable milestone in mid-July with final acceptance of another Ecliptic-produced onboard video system. The space-ruggedized and miniaturized video system will be used to observe post-launch activities on a satellite as it orbits at more than 22,000 miles above the Earth's surface.