Categories
Moon Landing Space Exploration

Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell’s MIT speech

Last week was Apollo 13’s 50th anniversary – the most “successful failure” in the history of space exploration. On April 27, 2016, former NASA astronaut and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell made a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and told the story of the legendary Apollo 13 flight. Here’s the full video of that speech below.

Categories
People Biology

A History of Pandemics [8000 B.C.-today]

Lindsay Holiday published two-part very informative video series titled “A History of Pandemics” on Youtube. These pandemics (and epidemics) have occurred countless times in the past, infecting, injuring and killing millions, and sometimes changing dramatically the course of human history.

But, first, what is a pandemic? What is an epidemic?

Categories
Moon Landing Space Exploration

Soviet N1 Rocket [3D model]

A 3D model of the Soviet N1 Rocket, which was intended to enable crewed travel to the Moon and beyond, Soviet counterpart to the United States’ mighty Saturn V, which was used by NASA between 1967 and 1973 during lunar landings.

Categories
Astrobiology Astronomy

A new Earth-sized planet (Kepler-1649c) in the habitable zone has been detected

A new Earth-sized planet named Kepler-1649c orbiting its star in the habitable zone has been detected by a team of scientists, using reanalyzed data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, NASA has announced.

Categories
Biology

What’s the Epidemiology Behind COVID-19?

In the last three months, our entire lives have been upended by an organism we can’t see and little understand. In the process, it has transformed millions of us into homeschool teachers of our children, remote workers, and public policy pundits as we debate what our government officials are doing right, and wrong, in response to this global crisis.

Categories
Earth from Space Space Exploration

Venice from Space, 2019 vs 2020

The European Space Agency (ESA) published an image showing Italy’s beautiful Venice from space, April 2019 vs April 2020.

The 2020 version shows the Grand Canal of Venice and the Giudecca Canal (Venetian: Canal de ła Zueca) are empty of boats.

Categories
Space Exploration Moon Landing

Apollo 13 Booster Impact Experiment [Footage by NASA]

The story of Apollo 13 (called a “successful failure” by the mission commander Jim Lovell) goes beyond a tale of survival. The mission also successfully completed a scientific investigation that is still helping to inform our understanding of the Moon to this day. Early in Apollo 13’s voyage, Mission Control sent the spacecraft’s empty S-IVB rocket booster on a collision course with the lunar surface, where a seismometer set up by the Apollo 12 mission would measure the tremors.

The video below, published by NASA Goddard Channel contains archival footage captured by the crew & newly-uncovered audio. It highlights the beginning and end of that impact experiment and shows how current data and imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission help us better interpret and analyze the results.

Categories
Life on Earth Moon Landing Space Exploration

Moon rocks could help reveal how life evolved on Earth

…and may enable us to resurrect extinct species

Life is the last thing you would associate with the eternally dark craters of the lunar poles. But these craters could hold the key to explaining how complex, multi-cellular organisms evolved on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, affording unimaginable insights into our planet’s biological past.

Duncan T Odom, University of Cambridge

Categories
Solar System Astronomy Photography

Moon looks like Saturn in this amazing photo

Amateur astrophotographer Francisco Sojuel took an amazing photo of our satellite: because of the clouds, the Moon looks like Saturn – as if it is attempting to impersonate the ringed planet.

Categories
Science Fiction Earth from Space Space Exploration

Astronaut Chris Hadfield reviews 12 popular Space movies [including Gravity and Interstellar]

In the video published on March 24, 2020, by the Vanity Fair magazine below, Canadian retired astronaut and former commander of the International Space Station (ISS), Chris Hadfield reviews space movies, including “Gravity” and “Interstellar”.