A previously undiscovered asteroid came within 14,000 km (8,700 miles) of Earth last week, and astronomers noticed it only 15 hours before closest approach. On Nov. 6 at around 16:30 EST a 7 meter asteroid, now called 2009 VA, came only about 2 Earth radii from impacting our home planet. This is the third-closest known non-impacting Earth approach on record for a cataloged asteroid.

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An American science student has captured images of the curvature of the Earth after sending a balloon into space on a shoestring budget. Oliver Yeh spent less than $150 on a secondhand camera, a GPS-enabled mobile phone, a weather balloon and a polystyrene coolbox which he launched from a field in Massachusetts as part of a science project.

The result was a time-lapse array of stunning photographs from the edge of space that could easily have come from Nasa, with its $17bn annual budget.

Yeh, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, enlisted two friends to help with Project Icarus, which he dreamed up to prove that it was possible to reach the upper levels of the atmosphere even on a tight budget. “For me, it was just about not being afraid to do what I love to do,” the 20-year-old said. “Before, people were just kind of, ‘That’s a crazy idea; there he goes all over again.’”

The camera, which Yeh bought on eBay, was positioned inside the coolbox to protect it from -40C temperatures 17.6 miles above the Earth’s surface. He cut a small hole for the lens then hooked the camera up to a computer programme that instructed it to take photographs every five seconds. He also placed a phone inside that broadcast its co-ordinates to help the team find and retrieve the device when the helium-filled balloon popped and it returned to Earth on a parachute.

The students launched the balloon on 2 September near their college. They expected the flight to last five hours, but soon lost contact with it, fearing that the low temperatures had frozen the phone’s battery. They later rediscovered the signal and found the camera undamaged 25 miles from the launch area. The team has since collated the hundreds of photographs taken during the flight into a video that they posted on YouTube and on their own website.

Yeh says his favourite image is the one taken at the peak of the flight, 17.5 miles from the Earth’s surface, just as the balloon popped and the camera began its descent.

Finally! The proof of Appolo mission fake landing!!!

Bill Elkins demonstrates the mobility of the EX-1A, which he developed at AiResearch in the late 1960s. It was the first suit to use his patented toroidal joints, and was the most mobile suit that had been created at that time. (Most of the motions in this video would not have been possible in the Apollo suit.) The EX-1A (which on the moon would have been covered with a cloth material) is pressurized 35 percent higher than the Apollo suits.
Those suits required considerable effort to move, and had pneumatic spring forces that rebounded to the neutral position. By contrast, the EX-1A joints were very low-torque and came much closer to mimicking the full mobility of the human body.

[VIA]

When Dr. Don Pettit lived aboard the International Space Station in 2002, he became known for his “Saturday Morning Science” sessions, during which he would demonstrate really cool, simple microgravity experiments.

Earlier this month, Pettit returned to space, this time as member of space shuttle Endeavour’s crew on a mission to upgrade the outpost. After 10 days of hard work, the STS-126 crew got some time off Sunday morning and Pettit took the opportunity to film a special episode of Saturday, err, Sunday Morning Science.

In his video, which he later narrated for Mission Control, Dr. Pettit demonstrated his take on a zero-gravity coffee cup…