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Posts Tagged ‘Earth And Space’

NASA sees "significant quantities" of water on the moon

Shortly after NASA’s LCROSS probe slammed into a crater in the polar region of the Moon, the Agency held a press conference to announce that it had obtained significant amounts of data from the collision. Unfortunately, to the frustration of many present, it wasn’t ready to interpret that data. That reticence ended today, as NASA held a press conference in which it announced that the data contains unambiguous evidence of water, present in what it termed “significant quantities.” But the signal from water isn’t the only one lurking in the data, and NASA is remaining coy about what the other signals indicate.

Back in October, the LCROSS mission sent two objects crashing into the Cabeus crater, which has an interior that is permanently shadowed due to its location in the Moon’s polar region. The first was a heavy booster rocket; its collision was imaged by instruments on the actual LCROSS probe, which followed it into the crater a few minutes later. Its collision was tracked by Earth- and space-based instruments.

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Failure is not an option: the official NASA iPhone app is here

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch, App Review

There are a lot of space geeks out there. You know the type; they wake up in the early hours of the morning to watch launch coverage or live feeds from the International Space Station, they follow NASA astronauts on Twitter, and they’re married to people in the space biz. Oh, wait — that’s me!

Yeah, I’m a bona-fide space geek and proud of it, so I was thrilled to hear that the official NASA iPhone app [iTunes Link] is now available free of charge. The app was created by the New Media Team at NASA Ames Research Center, and for their first app it’s surprisingly robust, bug-free and full of features.

The front screen of the app provides a window into current and future NASA missions. Along the bottom of the display are buttons for missions, images, videos, and updates. The updates are fairly current — there were 11 posts about various Earth and space missions today alone — and often include links to videos.

I found that the app worked best when I was downloading the videos over Wi-Fi, so be sure to keep that in mind if you’re trying to get watch a launch video while on 3G service. Check out the gallery below for screenshots from the app.

TUAWFailure is not an option: the official NASA iPhone app is here originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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