Thursday, March 31, 2011

FTL Possible With Negative Energy?

Well we have seen talks and articles on a manifold approach to FTL. One system we heard of last summer was a way for a ship to warp space ahead and behind it and be "pushed" along. This demonstration works on a similar system of expansion and contraction, but with a twist of a thing called negative energy. Check it out. From Boing Boing

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Brand New Mercury Photos


From Wired is news that NASA’s Messenger spacecraft transmitted its' first image of the planet Mercury. This photo is noteworthy as it is the first picture ever taken by a space-craft in orbit around Mercury.

According to the article:
  • The picture, shows Mercury’s southern hemisphere. The bright crater at the top of the image is called Debussy, and a smaller crater called Matabei lies to Debussy’s west
For more, check the Wired article here

Most Massive Black Hole Discovered


Wow, now this is just plain amazing! According to an article in 'The Daily Galaxy, the Chandra space telescope has uncovered a singularity in the M87 galaxy located in the Virgo Cluster that is so massive as to almost be beyond belief.

The black hole at the center of the super massive M87 galaxy tops out at 6.6 billion solar masses, yes BILLION. To put that into perspective, the central black hole in our Milky Way is a very respectable 4 million solar masses. Also what makes M87's singularity so frightening is the diameter of it's event horizon, which is aproximatly 20 billion km across!

Astronomers from the University of Texas :
  • theorizes that the M87 black hole grew to its massive size by merging with several other black holes.... of 100 or so smaller galaxies.
Another interesting theory concerning the M87 black hole is that due to it's size and relative proximity, may be the first black hole that we will be able to "see".

Check out the rest of the Daily Galaxy article here

Guess Who Was 80 Saturday!


Herb scooped me on this and it is corroborated by Trek Movie website, yep, I totally spaced that our favorite Vulcan Leonard Nemoy celebrated his 80th birthday Saturday March 26 2011. While we are on the subject of Mr. Nemoy, here are some interesting facts, from the TrekMovie.com site:
  • Began acting at the age of 8.
  • His wife Susan Bay is Transformers director Michael Bay’s cousin
  • Has authored seven books of poetry
  • Born only four days after William Shatner
  • Is a very competent photographer. Studied photography in UCLA in early 1970s and considered changing careers to photography full time
  • Has a master’s degree in education
  • Only actor to appear in every episode of original Star Trek
Many more facts on the trekmovie.com site here as well as some really great video shorts.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Lockheed Martin's A New Era of Space Exploration

From Lockheed Martin is this promo film of their view of how the Orion system will be utilized to get us to some pretty exciting places like Lagrange points, asteroids and ultimately Mars. It's self serving, no doubt, however it is a good look at how the main player in the system see's it working as a unit. The film is called A New Era of Space Exploration, which is damn pretentious but a whole lot of fun to watch. Check out this YouTube video

Friday, March 25, 2011

A Look at the new Wonder Woman


OH come on! IT IS TOO SCI FI! sheeeeeesh... what am I getting all worked up over? Well lets just say that I have a uh...renewed interest in classic science fiction ala comic book origins. My "research" has uncov....expos.... Oh to hell with it... here is Adriane Palicki in full (Linda Carter approved) Wonder Woman regalia

Palicki is no stranger to the tv sci-fi scene. Click here for a photo gallery of her other posi.....(damn it...tell me to stop!) sci-fi / fantasy television jobs.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

2010 Aurealis Award Nominees



From SFScope blog
  • The nominees for this year's Aurealis Awards have been announced. The Aurealis Awards were established in 1995 to "recognize the achievements of Australian science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers
Here is a partial listing of the science fiction nomination:

Science Fiction Short Story:
"The Heart of a Mouse" by K.J. Bishop (Subterranean Online)
"The Angaelian Apocalypse" by Matthew Chrulew (The Company Articles of Edward Teach/The Angaelian Apocalypse)
"Border Crossing" by Penelope Love (Belong)
"Interloper" by Ian McHugh (Asimov's Science Fiction)
"Relentless Adaptations" by Tansy Rayner Roberts (Sprawl)

Science Fiction Novel:
Song of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy (Eos)
Mirror Space by Marianne de Pierres (Orbit/Hachette)
Transformation Space by Marianne de Pierres (Orbit/Hachette)

The complete list is available at SFScope here


Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Ode to the Brain - Symphony of Science

Symphony of Science has released the ninth video in the series, "Ode to the Brain"! It covers various aspects of the human brain including its evolution, neurons, structure, and more.....

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

DAWN readying for July arrival at Vesta


Science Digest blog reports some of the details NASA's DAWN space craft as it starts to power up after fix months of inactivity. DAWN fired up instruments last week and the framing camera this week. All this activity is practice for the July arrival at Vesta.

According to the Science Daily article:
  • In the months to come, the camera system will provide images needed to navigate the spacecraft to its rendezvous with Vesta, and will begin to image the asteroid's surface. These early images on approach will be the start of a campaign to systematically map Vesta's surface in detail and will provide tantalizing clues as to its mineralogical composition.
Read complete SD article here

The Incident at Tower 37 - a short clever cg film

Here is a short C-G film call "The Incident at Tower 37" written by Chris Perry. Anything I can tell you about the film gives something away. I can say that it is VERY well done and for a film with no spoken words, that is saying a great deal. There is a lot of movie packed into a time line just a hair short of 11 minutes.

First look at L-M's Orion capsule


Here is a sneak peek of Lockheed Martin's Orion capsule. You may be wondering, WTF! they cut the funding for a moon return so why is this still being built. Well, according to Dvice blog - it's good for lots of other stuff, (like) ISS transport flights. You can plainly see the Apollo influence here. It sure does look like a Control Module on steroids don't it? But the thing to remember is that this thing can crew twice the capacity of an Apollo's 3. A couple of things that Dvice mentions that are a vast improvement over the Apollo craft is: (1) it's got a glass cockpit based on the one in the Boeing 787, and (2) "improved waste-management facilities" Now if that isn't a sign of an aging space effort when your biggest concerns are glasses and taking a dump....sigh....

Read more here in the Dvice article

Review: Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh


Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh
Night Shade Books (www.nightshadebooks.com)

Just about every post apocalyptic work I have ever read, treats the event as an instant or all but instantaneous event. Even movies for that matter, ie oh lets see...the first Mad Max, The Postman (book and movie) oh there are many movie examples, you don't want to drag out a movie I guess, but a book..... but even then its hard to put a finger to any that slowly let the world come apart. Granted, I may be nit picking here, but it does lend itself well to describing Will McIntosh's Soft Apocalypse. It could almost be called slow apocalypse but I bet NSB would have called him on that.

Anyway, Soft Apocalypse instead of taking place fairly quickly, evolves over a decade. The main character Jasper meanders through basically can be called southern United States for the most part. McIntosh has created something of an everyman with Jasper. Not your average post apocalyptic type. Not someone you would consider as a survivor, not overly successful in relationships, lots of self doubt and fear, just not the person you have come to expect when looking at a main character. But many times more realistic I suspect. Just because he seems to feel and react much as the average person would. At one point flat out wonders why thing just can't continue to get worse instead of one last gasp collapse. A frightening but I suspect all together normal.

Soft Apocalypse is a slow but steady decline but at the same time a morphing of the norm as well. Society doesn't just become a more violent version of itself, even though there is that aspect, but it is almost like there is this ultra slow quest for some sort of equilibrium.

McIntosh has put some effort into fleshing this mileu out. The type of breakdown societies are there but real early on and as things continue the paradigm shifts.

Soft Apocalypse is an edgy construct that I honestly think will be popular.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Left & Right SRB Recovery Mission

Here is something that we all hear about but I have never seen - the NASA SRB recovery ships in action? Huh? If you are interested in all aspects of a shuttle mission you will like this, or if like me your interested and live in a coastal fishing village and you just like to see the boats in action...check it out:



Check out NASA's youtube video site

Does the M in M-Theory Stand for Mental?


When i was ever so much younger, one of the meanest things a sib could insult you with was calling you mental. And not in a good way, because you were either being called a person of diminished capacity or just plain strange. Which in a slightly less PC manner brings me around to an article in Dvice concerning the LHC and time travel across the fifth dimension with help from dimensions six through possibly eleven according to one specific "theory of everything" called M-theory. Hence my response oh that has to stand for "mental"! So how does the LHC tie into this? Well it seems that scientists are looking for a Higgs singlet. And no that's not some sort of wife-beater that some guy named Higgs would wear, but is in fact a little beastie that cannot be stopped by any force in the universe.... You see, researchers say that if the Large Hadron Collider ever finds a Higgs boson that it just might spit out a Higgs singlet which believe it or not can pop out of the fifth dimension whenever it feels like it, and can hypothetically appear at more or less any point along the space-time continuum.
Hummmm kinda sounds like a time machine don't it now?

Believe me, there is more in this article that will fry a few synapses. Check out the complete Dvice Article here

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Refueling Geosync Sats?


Now this is something I never thought I would see... according to Space News blog, MDA of Canada has contracted with Intelsat to deliver 1000kg (half of the 2000kgs available) of fuel to Intelsats otherwise healthy satellites, adding several years of useful life to four or five satellites. In truth, only about 4 year of extended service are the mission's goal, as the electronic and solar arrays degrade due to the harsh conditions. Most satellites are designed to last about 15 years. Even though they could be fully refueled, the likelihood that the satellite would fail long before the 30 year period would be high.

Also at this point is still isn't clear who is libel should the MDA vehicle damage a satellite which would leave a catastrophic amount of debris in orbit.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

No Ordinary Family may be on the very ordinary chopping block!


Airlock Alpha is reporting that the cast of No Ordinary family has already started to abandon ship, giving every indication that the show is heading for the chopping block. Julie Benz, who plays the mom Stephanie Powell has already signed on with another project and co-star Michael Chiklis has also signed on for a new CBS comedy. Both have played in trailers for their respective projects. ABC has not made a statement regarding the status of the program yet however.

Airlock Alpha article

Corning's " A Day Made of Glass

Corning put together this video called "A Day Made Of Glass," which seems to be getting a great deal of attention on YouTube. The idea of the video is that the near future will be full of touchscreens, smart windows and appliances like stoves which are all made with glass! The neat thing is that the video shows everything from the house, to the car, to shopping and work-place all working together. IO9 blog of course has a somewhat different view of the milieu. Check out the IO9 blog comments here

Monday, March 14, 2011

Messenger spacecraft set for Mercury Orbit Insertion

NASA is reporting that Messenger, the first probe ever to orbit the planet Mercury, will move into orbit around Mercury on March 17, 2011. A 14 minute burn of its main engine will slow the craft by 1,929 mph. The maneuver will place the spacecraft into a 12-hour orbit about Mercury with a 124 mile minimum altitude.

It has taken MESSENGER a convoluted trip through the solar system and six years to become the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury and only the second to send back data since the Mariner 10 mission over 30 years ago. Here is a NASA video of the orbital insertion maneuver Messenger will take March 18th.



Thanks to Dan for the update

Earth Shifted on it's Axis?


Dan just brought some new data concerning Friday's earthquake in Japan. First off, according to Eryn Brown of the LA Times, the quake has been upgraded to a mind numbing magnitude 9.0 by the Japan Meteorological Agency! Plus according to Richard Gross, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the quake probably shifted the position of Earth's axis about 6.5 inches, causing the Earth to rotate somewhat faster, shortening the length of the day by about 1.8 microseconds! Just as amazing is data that shows that that the temblor's force moved parts of eastern Japan as much as 12 feet closer to North America

Review: Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths (special edition blu-ray)


Directed by Lauren Montgomery & Sam Liu
Written by Dwayne McDuffie
Starring
William Baldwin - Bruce Wayne / Batman
Mark Harmon - Kal-El / Clark Kent / Superman
Chris Noth - Lex Luthor
Gina Torres - Superwoman
James Woods - Owlman
Bruce Davison - President Slade Wilson
Josh Keaton - Wally West / The Flash, Aquaman (uncredited)
Vanessa Marshall - Princess Diana / Wonder Woman
Nolan North as Hal Jordan / Green Lantern, Power Ring (uncredited)

Anyone a fan of the Justice League animated series? I can’t say that I am a big fan (as far as the characters are concerned, I was somewhat a fan in the 60s & 70s) but I did want to see what all the smoke and noise was all about on the Cartoon Network. I never did get around to taking a look, so when I saw this movie being promoted on Batman: Under the Red Hood, I put it on my “to watch later” list. Well the picking became slim so I took a chance and watched the blu-ray of Crisis on Two Earths. As with Under the Red Hood, it is a fan movie. Ostensibly a bridge between the Justice League animated television series and a series that was supposed to be called Justice League Unlimited, which I never heard of. According to the Wiki the story line was based somewhat on much earlier Justice League called Crisis on Earth Three and a story from Grant Morrison called Justice League America: Earth 2 but was not directly taken from either.

The premise is a bit convoluted: a heroic Lex Luthor from an alternate universe coming to the Justice League's universe for help against the Crime Syndicate which in fact is an evil or better a negative or reversed version of the Justice League. It seems everyone in the Crime Syndicate is double dealing in some fashion. the Syndicate is supposedly constructing a weapon to counteract the nuclear threat by the parallel Earth’s government. However Batman’s analogue Owlman is in truth building a device to wipe out all reality. The climax is of course Batman on Owlman with the Universe at stake.

The additional features on the blu-ray are quite numerous. The disk includes an animated short called “The Specter” and a couple of two-episode tales from the Justice League television series which featured the Justice Lords. There are some behind the scene extras and some live action sneak peeks.

This is not anime and shouldn’t be held to that comparison. For the most part it’s standard American animation, though the film itself is a bit better rendered than usual, but not so much that it would look much different from the fare already present on the Cartoon network. If you’re not a fan you won’t get much out of the disk. The rendering is marginally better and the plot is little more than comic book grade. But it’s not terrible, maybe just monochromatic.

Movie (plot & rendering) 6 Extra 8 (plenty of them, lots to choose from) for a movie rating of 7.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

A Star Cooler than Boiling Water?


In a discovery that blurs the definition of what is a large planet and what is a small star comes a story from IO9 which details the discovery of a weird little beastie called a brown dwarf. We have known for some time that one of these strange little stars exists virtually in our backyard 63 light-years distant. But recently it's become clearer hows strange some of them are. Most of course are hardly larger than Jupiter. This means that Hydrogen fusion can not take place. (a mass 60 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter is needed) Brown dwarfs are often very dense animals. Though they may be about the size of Jupiter, they are many times more dense. It really is difficult to call them stars at all. The Spitzer telescope has uncovered a few brown dwarfs that are at most 16 Jupiter masses. Stranger still is their internal temperature is well below that of boiling water and one labeled WD 0806-661B may have a temperature of just 86 degrees Fahrenheit! How many hot days have you heard someone say "it's hotter than the surface of a star out today!" and now it could be a true statement! LOL.

Check out the rest of this weird article on the IO9 blog HERE

New Dark Tower novel next year?


Wow this could be a neat hat trick for Stephen King! According to Cory Doctorow writing for Boing Boing:
  • Stephen King has written another installment in the Dark Tower books
Whooooooooo hoooooooooo! Well if you have followed the series like I have then you know the mind bending twist at the end. You know who Roland and The Man In Black are and their "connection" (which lends the question...how long has this been going on?!) Anyway, according to Doctorow:
  • The new book, The Wind Through the Keyhole, will fill in some of the action between the fourth and fifth books
ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh (flinch flinch....one eye starts to twitch uncontrollably...) Well uhh.. Mr. King has the urge to back fill the holes in his narrative and has some pretty clear thoughts on the subject. Instead of just copying them here, I will post the link where you can read it for yourself on Cory Doctorow's blog here

Saturday, March 12, 2011

From Jokeroo: Old Men Fight with Light Sabers



Just too damn funny!

Friday, March 11, 2011

To Boldly Go Where No Craft Has Gone Before!


Here is a quick question for you to answer... (didn't know there would be a test when you started reading huh?) Name a science project that was started 30 years ago. The test instruments are still operational along with the platform even though it is now experiencing -400 degrees below zero. Need another hint? It's experiencing huge amounts of radiation and should you wish to send it a message it will take 16 hours! Got it? huh? Did you guess Voyager? Yep! Voyager 1 matter of fact. So why the interest? Well the craft has not been asked to perform any maneuvers since 1990. Last month controllers asked it to perform a 70 degree roll using its gyroscopes, which it did flawlessly.

From the Dvice article:
  • NASA is planning to start having Voyager roll on a regular basis to better detect changes in the solar wind, which is petering out as the spacecraft approaches the boundary with interstellar space. Five of these rolls are planned for the next seven days, with more rolls every week for the next three months..
Have you ever stopped to consider just how mind bending this little craft is? It masses only a little over a half a ton (1,592 lbs), 16 hydrazine thrusters (I suspect long out of fuel), three-axis stabilization gyroscopes and celestial referencing instruments. The scientific payload consists of 11 scientific instruments to study celestial objects. Communications is accomplished over the s and x bands through a 12 foot antenna with a maximum bandwidth as high as 115.2 kilobits per second. Should it be unable to communicate with Earth, Voyager will store up to 62,500-kilobytes of data with a Digital Tape Recorder! (DTR?!!! no way!) All of this is done with less than the amount of power that light five 100 watt light bulbs! Obviously that far out, solar is not possible. Voyager 1 has 3 radioisotope thermoelectric generators each generator includes 24 pressed plutonium oxide spheres which will power the craft until 2025!

Check out the Dvice article here And the excellent Wikipedia reference here

Thursday, March 10, 2011

The Cape Has Been Cleaned, Folded and Put Away...


Anyone out there watching "The Cape"? The plot is well worn and contrived but in a nut-shell, a cop is accused of committing heinous crimes. To clear his name he must make everyone believe that he is dead, even his wife and his young son. To clear his name he takes on the persona of a comic book character that his son adores called "The Cape", a mysterious masked and hooded vigilante.

NBC has been hosting the series staring David Lyons, Keith David, Summer Glau among others was scheduled for 13 episodes but rather quickly, NBC, reduced the order to 10 and then outright canceled the series. In an odd twist, NBC will not even air the final episode will only be available as an online exclusive.

The weirdest thing to come out of this latest cancellation are fans speculating that Summer Glau has a curse on her! lol I am serious! Glau fans unhappily point out that every show she has been a part of has been canceled! OH MY! lmao!

Read complete Airlock Alpha article

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Good bye Discovery


Well I am sure you know what 3/9/11 is all about. I can't imagine that anyone reading this right now has to have STS 133 explained in detail. However just to put a small cap on it.
From Space.com:
  • Discovery landed for the final time here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 11:57 a.m. EST
Having that melancholy moment again are we?

And just so Space.com can nail it home for Discovery one last time:
  • after 27 years and 39 flights, Discovery's wheels rolled to a stop for the very last time under the warm sun at the Florida spaceport's Shuttle Landing Facility.
Not to lessen the fact that the shuttle program was fraught with engineering failures, cost over-runs - despite the fact that it was never even close to as fast, cheap or safe as it was promoted as becoming - It still was a damn fine space craft of a fleet of supremely capable machines. The people who designed, maintained and flew the system were and are the best in the world at what they do. I know, it's just a machine, but at the risk of anthropomorphizing it - it was a damn fine one!

Space.com article

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Outside In - Saturn flyby

The Dvice blog brought this neat project to my attention. The Outside In project is a full-length feature IMAX film that aims to take the watcher on a breath taking tour of the Solar System. What will make this project truly unique will be the source material. No CGI will be used. Instead the movie will be built up from literally thousands of photographs taken of the Solar System by a variety of space craft. The whole project is dependant completely on donations, but instead of waiting for the money the film's producers have worked on completing part of the film consisting of a fly-by of the Saturn system using Cassini photos. This short alone is spectacular! The composites are flawless in my opinion. Check this short out and take a look at the film's web site here.

Outside In Concept Teaser Trailer from stephen v2 on Vimeo.

STS - 133 Wake up Call!

Shuttle flight STS - 133 got one of the best wake up calls ever! Courtesy of William Shatner in full blown Captain James Tiberius Kirk persona doing the Star Trek opening but updated for the shuttle.

Come on....just for a second...fess up... you had that feeling just for a split second...thought so...softie!

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Ancient Geological Formations Were Working Reactors


In sixteen different areas in an African uranium mine are ancient evidence that at one point in distant history there were naturally occurring nuclear reactors capable of generating 100kws of electricity! What is even more astounding is that the reaction was stable for thousands of years. Now before you get yourself in a tizzy remember how powerful 100kws is. An electric heater pulls about 5kws so we are talking about 20 or so heaters. But it's how LONG they ran, now that's amazing! How can a reactor sustain itself without running away and melting down? It seems that ground water played a big part. It only ran periodically so the reaction had a chance to build and then water was introduced to inhibit runaway. So for a hundred thousand years or so this system would heat up and then water would shut it off only to start over again. I know, gross oversimplification of the process - but to be able to take place at all a few billion years ago is mind twisting!

Scientific American
via Dvice blog

Airforce Lalunches another spy plane


On the heals of the historic mission when in December the X-37B became the United States' first unmanned vehicle to return from space and land on its own. Now a second Boeing-built X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV, left Cape Canaveral, Fla. atop an Atlas V rocket. The X-37B, which was originally a NASA project, has the potential to pick up where the space shuttle program will leave off, least that is what Boing is saying - the Air-Force's position is that the program "has the potential to make space experiments more affordable. But the lack of clear mission statements past the overt, has lent the X-37B program an air of intrigue. Speculation has lead to suggesting the OTV may facilitate the development of combat and weapons systems. While others have suggested that the unmanned craft could be used as an orbital spy vehicle.

The latest mission is scheduled to last about 270 days, but the Air Force said that might be extended. The first craft stayed in orbit 224 days.

Read more



Thursday, March 03, 2011

Comedy: Tron - Legacy/Big Lebowski trailer mashup.

Blade Runner prequel?


I am reading on the IO9 blog news that suggests that there is a new Blade Runner movie in the wind. Yeah! I know! That was my first reaction.

But according to IO9, Alcon Entertainment Warner Bros-based financing and production company ) and Bud Yorkin are in "final negotiations" to secure the rights to the film.

But the weird thing is that the rights would be all inclusive EXCEPT to remake the film, so no reboot....prequel or sequel is what seems to be on the table.

Read the press release that IO9 posted to see the convolutions...or C...F... if you would

Whacked Cyborg!


From "This Isn't Happiness via Boing Boing has got to be one of the most disturbing "cyborgedized" (yep, made that one up) beings yet. Not that it could happen, but that someone was whacked enough to think this one through to this point. Like the article says, the pictures are "uncredited scan from a unnamed Cyrillic (Russian?) book"

The old "Lassie? Timmy is where?" certainly take on a new life of their own now. Let the speculations begin!

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Like grains of sand...these are the red dwarfs in our skies...


Dan sends in an article by the "amateur naturalist" Dana Wilde commenting on how our view of the universe has changed in less than a hundred years. I just can't resist beating around some of the ideas that Wilde brings up.

Who doesn't remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos? Sagan would often make a pronouncement of scale that was totally astounding. I can clearly remember Sagan in the early 80s proclaiming that there are more stars than grains of sand on the beaches of Earth. Now one astronomer trying to put a number to Sagan's pronouncement estimated that there are about 2000 billion billion grains of sand on Earth. That's a serious haul of stars by anyone's estimate.

In amongst the visible class of stars are, for lack of a better label, ghost stars. Stars so small, dim and cool as to be all but invisible under most detection methods. Red Dwarf stars and no one could come up with a reasonable amount of these "ghost stars'. Recently Yale astronomers determined that there are many more of red Dwarf stars than anyone thought possible. Yale astronomers detected the light from red dwarf stars in the spectra of large elliptical galaxies and from this determined that red dwarfs account for around 60% of the mass (star mass) of those galaxies. That is triple what was previously thought to exist!

What is even wilder about red dwarfs is just how slow they age. Because they are relatively cool and very small these stars burn their fuel very slowly. So slowly in fact that the present universe is not old enough for red dwarf stars to grow "old". Which when you come to think about it means that virtually every red dwarf that present at creation of the universe, is still burning 13+ billion years later!

Bangor Daily News article

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Huge Luna Cave Discovered

In a recent Gizmodo article there is a report that the Indian Space Research Organization has discovered a "giant underground chamber" near the Moon's equator, in the Oceanus Procellarum area.

Discovered by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft the structure is more than one mile long and 393 feet wide.

The ISRO is speculating on good uses for the huge cave. It is sufficiently well protected to block harmful radiation from damaging long term occupants as well as constant temperatures of around -4 Fahrenheit where the surface experiences huge variations in temperature.