Christian Stangl spent 18-months creating "Lunar," a project that uses digital effects - mainly stop-motion and panoramic stitching - to turn thousands of NASA images of the Apollo missions into a short film. "I was fascinated by the amount and the quality of the Pictures. They were thousands of that beautiful high-res photographies made by the famous Hasselblad-Moon camera. When I looked at the Archive, I knew immediately that I want to make a film with these photos," Stangl told Peta Pixel. Click here to view the first image in this week's funny demotivational posters gallery. Continue reading for a viral video of a faceless fish that hasn't been seen in 100-years.
Unveiled at the Kennedy Space Center, NASA's all-new Mars Rover weighs in at 6,000 pounds, and has room for 4 astronauts. All of its 6 wheels measure in at 50 inches in height, with treads designed specifically for Martian sand. It's powered by a 700 volt battery, and can hit speeds of 70 mph on Earth, and about 10-15 mph on Mars. Continue reading for another video, more pictures and information.
Ukraine's Antonov An-225 was previously the world's largest plane, that is, until billionaire Paul Allen's Stratolaunch rolled its low-orbit-launch aircraft out of the company's hangar in the California desert for the first time. Its wings span 385-feet - larger than the An-225's 290 feet, and is powered by six high-bypass-ratio turbofan engines. Allen intentds to "provide convenient, reliable, and routine access to low-Earth orbit." This is why it has a designed maximum takeoff weight of 1.3 million pounds. "This marks a historic step in our work to achieve Paul G. Allen's vision of normalizing access to low-Earth orbit. We have a lot of exciting activity ahead as we enter the testing process, and we look forward to sharing our progress during the coming months," said Stratolaunch Systems CEO Jean Floyd. Click here to view the first image in today's viral picture gallery. Continue reading for the five most popular viral videos today, including one of a waterless toilet backed by Bill Gates.
NASA is set to launch the Parkar Solar Probe into the sun's scorching atmosphere to see how the star works and what can be done to better predict space weather events on Earth. The spacecraft needs to survive temperatures as high as 2,500° Fahrenheit, impacts by supersonic particles, and powerful radiation, as it circles as close as 4-million-miles to the sun. "We're going to be seven times closer (to the sun) than any other mission has ever been," said project scientist Nicola Fox. Continue reading for a video news report, and more information.
Located 21-light-years away, GJ 625 is an M-dwarf star approximately 1/3 the size and mass of the sun, and recently, astronomers discovered a super Earth, three times the size of our planet, orbiting it. It orbits the inner edge of an M-dwarf star's habitable zone, and takes around 14-days to complete one orbit. "We report the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting at the inner edge of the habitable zone of the star GJ 625 based on the analysis of the radial-velocity (RV) time series from the HARPS-N spectrograph, consisting in 151 HARPS-N measurements taken over 3.5 yr," according to the research paper. Click here to view the first image in this week's funny work pictures gallery. Continue reading for a viral video of a massive underwater main explosion in Ukraine.
DARPA's futuristic spaceplane is set to become a reality, and it will be built by Boeing's Phantom Works division. Previously known as the Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1), the Phantom Express will be an unmanned, autonomous, hypersonic, reusable spaceplane that can deliver small payloads of 3,000-pounds to low Earth orbit. The spacecraft will launch vertically utilizing an Aerojet Rocketdyne AR-22 engine that is fueled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. "Phantom Express is designed to disrupt and transform the satellite launch process as we know it today, creating a new, on-demand space-launch capability that can be achieved more affordably and with less risk," said Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works. Click here to view the first image in today's viral picture gallery. Continue reading for the five most popular viral videos today, including one that shows why you should never pour grease down a drain.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos revealed that he would eventually like to see millions of people living and working in space, during a Q&A session at Seattle's Museum of Flight. "I think we should build a permanent human settlement on one of the poles of the moon. It's time to go back to the moon, but this time to stay," said Bezos. Rockets from Blue Origin, a company also owned by Bezos, will land near the Shackleton Crater on the south pole, an area with constant sunlight. These rockets could deliver up to 10,000-pounds of goods to help establish the first human colonies. Click here to view the first image in this week's funny work pictures gallery. Continue reading for a viral video of Elon Musk's McLaren F1 in 1999.
While many 18-year-olds are worrying about college, Rifath Shaarook from India spent his time building the world's lightest satellite, from scratch. Weighing a mere 64 grams, the device will now go on a four-hour mission aboard a sub-orbital NASA flight during which it will operate for around 12-minutes in a micro-gravity environment of space. "We did a lot of research on different cube satellites all over the world and found ours was the lightest," said Shaarook about his 3D-printed, carbon fiber small-scale satellite. Continue reading for more pictures and information.
The U.S. military's experimental, unmanned X-37B space plane landed safely on Sunday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after completing a classified mission that lasted nearly two years. Built by Boeing, it blasted off in May 2015 from nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas 5 rocket built by United Launch Alliance. The X-37B conducted unspecified experiments for 718 days while in orbit, making this the fourth and lengthiest mission so far for the secretive program, managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. According to the Air Force, it's used to "perform risk reduction, experimentation and concept-of-operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies." Click here to view the first image in today's viral picture gallery. Continue reading for the five most popular viral videos today, including one showing how to escape quicksand.
Scientists have captured an image of a dark matter bridge for the first time, and this basically confirms the theory that galaxies are connected by a cosmic web. This was made possibly using a technique called weak gravitational lensing, in which researchers identified distortions of distant galaxies as they are influenced by a large, unseen mass, like dark matter. Continue reading for another video and more information.
