Dead Satellite Crashes Into Pacific, Kills No One [space, news]

A dead 6-ton NASA satellite has fallen into the Pacific Ocean off the west coast, killing no one.

Officials are having trouble determining its exact location.

It is estimated that the odds of any one person being hit is 1 in 22 trillion.

This is the largest satellite to crash into the Earth's atmosphere since 1979, when both the 75-ton Skylab Space Station and the 10-ton Pegasus 2 satellite fell to Earth.

Space Docs [documentaries]

Since I am particularly fond of documentary film, I am going to try to make a weekly post in which I feature free documentary films available online; usually they will all have a theme or some common subject about them, but I am known to be random.

This week's post features space/astronomy-themed docs. Enjoy!



From Top Documentary Films.com:

Space Race is a BBC docudrama series first shown in Britain on BBC2 in 2005, chronicling the major events and characters in the American – Soviet space race up to the first landing of a man on the moon.
It focuses on Sergei Korolev, the Soviet chief rocket designer, and Wernher von Braun, his American counterpart.
The series was a joint effort between British, German, American and Russian production teams.



Living on Mars

On the surface, the red planet’s freeze-dried world of rocks, ice, and dust looks like an unlikely place to plant a garden.
But rocks and minerals found by the Mars rovers show it must once have had warmer, habitable living conditions.
Now, using photo-realistic CGI visualizations, we’ll make a science fiction dream of Mars – a world of trees, rivers, and blue skies – a plausible future, bringing it to life after three-and-a-half billion years in a deep freeze.



Secrets of the Star Disc

When grave robbers ransacked a Bronze Age burial in Germany, they had no idea that they had unearthed the find of a lifetime.
The disc they found combines an advanced understanding of the stars with some of the most sophisticated religious imagery of the age.In intellectual achievement and also age, it surpasses anything yet found in Egypt or Greece. It seems that civilization had already dawned in North Central Europe.

Space Hotel Now Taking Reservations [space]

Want to stay at a hotel in space? Well you can now! Or, in 2012.

Father & Son Make Homemade Spacecraft, Record Video [tech]

This is pretty awesome. A father and son from New York built their own spacecraft in which they attached an iPhone and launched it into space, capturing an incredible video.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

space briefings.

daddy, forget the pony, i want a space orbiter!

NASA is now selling old space orbiters to raise money; museums and other organizations are able to bid on the space memorabilia.

in other space news, a meteorite hit lorton, virginia last week.

algae + sewage = fuel!

NASA is doing something really cool; besides the whole space exploration thing, in light of the rising cost of energy, depleting resources, and climate change, they have been experimenting with alternate sources of energy and have been devising a method of growing algae in waste water for the purpose of making biofuel.

Read the full article here on SPACE.COM.

MIT students do it on the cheap

in the true DIY nerd spirit, two MIT students launched a camera built out of a cellphone attached to a helium balloon into the stratosphere and took some pretty amazing photographs. it's amazing what creative minds and $150 can do.

read the original article at space.com