Sure, NASA lost a lot of money when its Orbiting Carbon Observatory took a nosedive into the ocean — around $250 million (because $30 million of ts $278 million budget hadn’t been spent yet). But what about the science? NASA is thinking about that too. The agency is going through a muddy era that mirrors, [...]
NASA’s Kepler mission lifted off without a hitch just before 11 p.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch was a bit of a nail-biter, coming on the heels of last week’s failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which plummeted (all $270 million of it) into the ocean when its casing malfunctioned. But everything [...]
Well, that was about the saddest news briefing I’ve ever seen. At a hastily-arranged press conference, three NASA officials spoke on NASA TV this morning about the failed launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite that was supposed to fill in some missing links about the role of human-emitted carbon in climate change. [...]
This afternoon, I wrote a post for Universe Today about Jay Melosh, a planetary scientist from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Melosh has an interesting idea about how life could have developed on Earth — after being flung from the surface of Mars along with impact ejecta. And when I went back to check [...]
Since I’ve been back in the South, I’ve noticed certain regional peculiarities about food. I’d remembered from growing up in North Carolina that pork — specifically barbecue — was big here. There’s something too about fried cuisine: fried pickles, fried mac and cheese, fried brownies and fried Snickers candy bars are all likely to pop up [...]
