nasa

When the Space Shuttle Endeavour launches Friday afternoon, assuming it is not delayed, the astronauts onboard and the technicians on the ground at mission control will have at their disposal new software that could streamline the process of problem reporting and analysis.

The software, called the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system, was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA's Ames Research Center, and is designed to give a wide cross-section of people in the Space Shuttle ecosystem access to a single database package for tracking problems with the Shuttle and its associated infrastructure.

According to … Read more

If you're the kind of person who wants to do research on the International Space Station, it appears that you may need to cross some boundaries of taste many of us wouldn't even consider.

According to a BBC News story Friday, the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday afternoon, will be handing off to their Space Station colleagues a water regeneration system designed to, among other things, recycle urine for reuse as fresh water.

The system, which will ionize, filter, distill, and oxidize wastewater, "will … Read more

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--Scientists who want to see how the moon has changed in the years since the Apollo missions will soon have the ability to do just that.

That's thanks to a new NASA project in which the agency has restored 42-year-old images taken of and from the moon, all of which will be made freely available to the public.

And while many people will surely have an interest in examining the iconic images, several NASA personnel on hand Thursday at an event celebrating the project explained that it provides the real scientific benefit of making it possible … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If you're one of the many people who doubt there's intelligent life anywhere else in the universe, or even someone who thinks there is but that it will take centuries to find it, get ready to be surprised.

"We'll find E.T. within two dozen years," senior SETI astronomer Seth Shostak said Tuesday night at an event held at Yahoo's Brickhouse here.

That is, he said, if the assumptions of many researchers within the SETI Institute are correct, assumptions that are based on a collision of computing power under Moore's Law and … Read more

The last Twitter post said it all: "01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000."

For those of you who aren't fluent in binary, the post, from NASA's Mars Phoenix Twitter account, translates as "triumph."

According to NASA, the space agency is no longer receiving communications from Phoenix, its Mars lander, after more than five months of operation. The not unexpected event came after the lander moved into an area, NASA said in a release Monday, where "seasonal decline in sunshine at the robot's arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for … Read more

Earlier this year NASA demonstrated its Chariot Lunar Rover concept, and now the space agency is demonstrating its adoption of modern automotive industrial practices by applying platform engineering to the Chariot, coming up with the Small Pressurized Rover (SPR). Built on the Chariot platform, the SPR is one variation of a lunar vehicle being tested by NASA. It uses a pressurized cabin that can seat two comfortably, or four in an emergency. Astronauts could view the surface of the moon, performing tests and experiments, in T-shirts. Instead of using a bulky airlock, the SPR has two extra vehicular-activity suits attached to sealable ports. An astronaut can enter the suit from inside the SPR, detach it, pick up some moon rocks or help build a lunar colony, then reattach to the SPR and climb back into the cabin. … Read more

Reporter Ina Fried gives us the skinny on what Microsoft is cooking up for its next version of Windows and tells us how a Web-accessible version of Office will work.

Also in this podcast: the man behind the video game Doom wins the first level of the X Prize Foundation's lunar-lander contest; Google reaches a settlement with authors and publishers over its searchable online library of books; and MTV opens its vast archive of music videos--old and new--to people on the Web.

Today's stories:

Next version of Office heads to the browser… Read more

Justin feels blue before the show, but a group hug and a little well-placed bromance sets him right. It's a touching prelude to what is perhaps the 404's raunchiest show ever! In other news, NASA combats space depression with virtual therapy, the Army reads terrorist tweets, and a shocking number of sex addicts are women. Also, please don't trust your GPS navigator too much. Check out The 404's exclusive scoop on Mac's newest OS--it's tight and supports multitouch functionality!

Dan the Mantern here. On today's show we discuss a timeless question that doe-eyed youths have asked their parents for ages: "What happens when you fart in space?" Apparently, letting one loose in an infinite vacuum can have much more dire consequences than one might believe. Farting inside of a space suit can be dangerous, if you try to let the stank out while doing a space walk. Unfortunately, the likelihood of a well-time fart inside the space station becoming a source of DIY zero-gravity propulsion is low, according to one Canadian astronaut. Finally, check out this dramatic interpretation of a space fart from Disney's 1997 classic Rocket Man.

Is being an astronaut really all that much fun?

You get otherworldly for a while, but, as some children on vacation will tell you, floating can get old very quickly.

While a few astronauts become heroes, some seem to come back to earth and never come back to earth. Their behavior becomes eccentric. Their utterances become bizarre. Some even claim they have seen aliens.

A question worth asking is whether many of these astronauts were already a bit weird before they floated off into space. And I'm not even including the ones who wear diapers whenever they slip into … Read more