arielwaldman:

I’m totally over the moon about this: I’m featured in a TV spot airing on SyFy as part of their Let’s Imagine Greater campaign! You can catch it “live” on the SyFy channel this weekend: Saturday @ 6:13pm EST & Sunday @ 5:33pm EST. Or just check it out above!

SyFy’s tagline is “Let’s Imagine Greater” and this is part of a campaign to get everyone to imagine amazing things – and hopefully create them! This is very much in line with my work: Spacehack.org is about anyone being able to explore space and make scientific discoveries, and Science Hack Day is all about getting excited and making things with science. You can hear more about my story and some of my miscellaneous thoughts at my page on the Let’s Imagine Greater site.

The shoot was so much fun – I was acting out a lot of things on green screen, so it’s great to see how it all comes together in the end. I really loved filming on a set – I hope it’ll be the first of many.

NATL_SYFY_SHOOT_59
photo by David Chun
NATL_SYFY_SHOOT_57
photo by David Chun
SyFy shoot for Let's Imagine Greater campaign
Me & creative director Chris Dooley, photo by David Chun

More photos from the shoot are at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjz5pTM4.

Want to chat with me about imagining amazing-awesome-weird science-y things or how you can get involved as a spacehacker? Save the date: March 28, 4-5pm EST. I’ll be hosting a live TweetChat – follow @letsimaginegrtr and join the discussion at http://tweetchat.com/room/letsimaginegreater or by watching #letsimaginegreater.

(via itsfullofstars)

Source: arielwaldman.com

8bitfuture: SpaceX CEO talks about mission to Mars. SpaceX is currently focusing efforts on a mission to the International Space Station, with current test flights leading up to a planned docking with the ISS in December this year. During the AIAA Propulsion conference this week, CEO Elon Musk spoke about his plans for other places like the Moon or Mars. “Ultimately, the thing that is super important in the grand scale of history is—are we on a path to becoming a multi-planet species or not? If we’re not, that’s not a very bright future. We’ll just be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us,” Musk said. First on the list would be a vehicle that’s capable of delivering substantial mass to Mars and then returning to Earth. The company’s planned Falcon Heavy rocket, the plans for which were unveiled in April, could conceivably carry 12 to 15 metric tons, but “I think you’ll probably want a vehicle that can deliver something on the order of 50 metric tons … in a fully reusable manner,” Musk said. The Falcon Heavy, which will be the world’s largest rocket, will have its inaugural flight in late 2012.
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8bitfuture:

SpaceX CEO talks about mission to Mars.

SpaceX is currently focusing efforts on a mission to the International Space Station, with current test flights leading up to a planned docking with the ISS in December this year.

During the AIAA Propulsion conference this week, CEO Elon Musk spoke about his plans for other places like the Moon or Mars. “Ultimately, the thing that is super important in the grand scale of history is—are we on a path to becoming a multi-planet species or not? If we’re not, that’s not a very bright future. We’ll just be hanging out on Earth until some eventual calamity claims us,” Musk said.

First on the list would be a vehicle that’s capable of delivering substantial mass to Mars and then returning to Earth. The company’s planned Falcon Heavy rocket, the plans for which were unveiled in April, could conceivably carry 12 to 15 metric tons, but “I think you’ll probably want a vehicle that can deliver something on the order of 50 metric tons … in a fully reusable manner,” Musk said.

The Falcon Heavy, which will be the world’s largest rocket, will have its inaugural flight in late 2012.

(via 8bitfuture)

Competition Shines Light on Dark Matter | The White House

“Recently, top experts celebrated an exciting breakthrough from an unexpected place.

On May 23, a consortium of the very best from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Royal Astronomical Society posted the problem on the data-mining website Kaggle and Challenge.gov for all the world to weigh in. In less than a week, Martin O’Leary, a PhD student in glaciology, had crafted an algorithm that outperformed the state-of-the-art algorithms most commonly used in astronomy for mapping dark matter.

…

 O’Leary applied techniques used in his field – glaciology - such as detecting edges in glacier fronts from satellite images.  This might seem like an unlikely source of progress, but it is exactly why competitions like this one are so often successful: they encourage people who usually focus on problems unrelated to the question at hand to apply their problem-solving skills to analogous problems in other fields. So it is that the study of glaciers on Earth has now deepened our understanding of the cosmos.”

Space geekery going mainstream! Citi made a commercial about launching weather balloon payloads into near-space!

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