Category Archives: Space & Astronomy

Measure cosmic rays with your cell phone

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

CRAYFIS (Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones) is a cool new project that plans to use the world-wide array of existing smartphones to detect low energy particles produced by high energy comic ray collisions in the atmosphere. From the project website: When … Continue reading →

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Cygnus in full view

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

Here in New England, we had a spectacular starry sky tonight.  The moon was a thin crescent, and disappeared soon after sunset.  By about 10 o’clock there were quite a few recognizable constellations in the dark sky to the west.  Cygnus (the Swan, … Continue reading →

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Space-X cargo rocket delivers 3-D printer to the International Space Station

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

The latest Space-X unmanned Dragon mission is set to deliver 5000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station today. On board is a 3-D printer designed to test the concept of making parts in space from raw materials, a … Continue reading →

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Apollo 11 landing, 45 years ago today

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

Click here for a roundup of reminiscences and check out space.com for more complete coverage.

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NASA Makes Progress on World’s Largest Rocket

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

Yahoo News has a short video on the progress NASA is making developing the Space Launch System (SLS), which would be the world’s largest rocket when operational.  Unfortunately, what NASA has produced to date is mostly scale models and animated movies, with the … Continue reading →

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Elon Musk on the Future of Design

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

Virtual reality interactions with 3-D CAD models, followed by laser-based metal sintering 3-D printing. Really cool stuff. SpaceX is using these tools to build their next generation reusable launch system. Elon Musk is Tony Stark. Or is it the other … Continue reading →

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Good day for SpaceX

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

Friday SpaceX had a successful launch of a Dragon cargo capsule, and what looks like promising results from a controlled splashdown test of booster landing capability. Check out this video of the most recent land-based testing of the Falcon 9R: Really … Continue reading →

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Spectacular Night Sky as Winter Turns to Spring

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

As Winter turned to Spring here in Eastern Massachusetts, tonight’s sky was spectacular (the image above is a fairly good approximation).  At about 9 o’clock facing West, there was an amazing view of Orion looming in the middle of the sky, … Continue reading →

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Moore’s Law for Space-Based Imaging

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Alexander Szewczak

Hundreds of eyes in the sky, just like this one. Getting better, cheaper, and more numerous every year. Imagine a network of satellites, all taking daily pictures of the earth beneath them and reporting that data back to earth in … Continue reading →

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