Tag Archives: NASA

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Virus on space station searched for video game logins

USB drives transported viruses into space...NASA revealed today that some of the laptops used by astronauts on the International Space Station were infected with the computer virus Gammima.AG. The laptops, which were carried to the station in July for nutritional programs and email, were believed to be infected when they arrived.

Gamminma.AG is a year old virus that steals logins for online computer games for sale by software pirates. Computer experts say the astronauts should have disabled the ‘autorun’ command from the laptops as the virus travels by USB stick. NASA may have been caught out but there are instructions to prevent such malware automatically subverting your computer.

I wonder if the virus managed to steal any of the astronauts logins to World of Warcraft or Sins of A Solar Empire? Are avatars worth more if their user has travelled into space?

[via Google News, picture by Caro’s Lines]

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Water on Mars? Yup. Life? Naaaaah… or, well, perhaps.

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NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander - artist's impressionOK, so we’re pretty positive about there being water on Mars now, but if you thought all was certainty in the realms of planetary exploration, you’d be wrong wrong wrong. [image courtesy NASA]

It’s all Aviation Week‘s fault, after they ran a story claiming that the White House had just been…

“… alerted by NASA about plans to make an announcement soon on major new Phoenix lander discoveries concerning the “potential for life” on Mars”.

As delightfully ambiguous as any pre-press-release announcement… and unsurprisingly (perhaps even as planned?) home-brew speculationists have been clogging the intertubes with theories about what NASA is (or was, or wasn’t) planning to announce.

So far, so unsurprising. Until you discover that the Phoenix lander itself* has announced that it definitely hasn’t discovered life and that there has been no such White House briefing. What gives?

Personally I suspect nothing more than the results of old-school media briefings and funky new methods (social-media-ZOMG!) getting a bit out of sync, but why spoil a potentially good conspiracy theory, eh? If you really want to burst that irrational bubble, Karl Schroeder has a pretty plausible explanation of what’s probably going on.

The recent discovery that the soil at the Phoenix lander site could support some earthly plants would appear to contradict the findings of the Viking landers from the 1970s. Those craft deployed sophisticated experiments to determine whether life is present on Mars, yet the instruments returned ambiguous results. There was a strong signal indicating life from some of the instruments, yet no evidence of biological material in the soil. The official interpretation that has become orthodoxy as a result, is that the Martian soil is highly oxidizing, ie. that it contains compounds such as hydrogen peroxide that destroy biological materials.

But if Phoenix has found that you could grow earthly plants in the soil at its site, doesn’t this cast serious doubt on that interpretation?

So, not so much “discovering life” as “possibly refuting a speculative negative interpretation of positive results gathered decades ago in support of the possibility of life”… but it doesn’t take a degree in journalism to see which of those two makes the better headline, AMIRITE?

[ * – Well, someone on the team, but you know what I mean. ]

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New ESA/Russian manned spacecraft pictures!

Check out the Soyuz capsule replacement and conceptual artwork here.

One of the most unusual features about the capsule appear to be the thrusters and landing gear on its underside. Mr Zak said it would use these engines to soften its landing on Earth after the fiery re-entry through our atmosphere.

It’s interesting how the national space agencies seem to see the future in rockets, rather than space planes, for space exploration.

What with the Space Shuttle being retired in 2010, and with a possible alternative European plan for a manned version of the ATV called Jules Verne, as well as the American Ares V rockets planned for use in Project Constellation, it seems it’s no longer de rigueur to build spaceplanes unless you’re a private space tourism company.

[story from BBC News]

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Cancer-causing Concrete! Nice!

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So those cancer-causing nanotubes that people are raving about (wait, are they?) might be combined with the vast supply of dust and debris on the moon to make a new kind of concrete for structures on the moon.  It seems like a workable idea, though, and the cost of structures would be very minimal.  NASA’s idea is to build telescopes, satellite arrays, and other equipment on the moon and utilize this new “concrete” for those purposes.  Considering all the material is readily available, it doesn’t really take much to conceive of a science station up there.  Or a moon colony – oh, now that’s exciting.

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NASA tests giant robot that could pick up and move a Moon base

ATHLETE robot My last couple of posts have been about nanotechnology, so naturally this time around it was an item on something very large that caught my eye (Via NewScientist Space):

NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometres across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing site.

ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer–is there, like a whole department at NASA dedicated just to coming up with acronyms?) would be about 7.5 metres wide, with legs more than 6 metres long. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, are now testing two small-scale prototype.

Check out the video of ATHLETE lowering itself,  video of ATHLETE walking and driving, and video of two ATHLETE robots lifting a mock lunar module off its mount).

(Image: NASA/JPL)

[tags]robots,NASA,lunar exploration,Moon[/tags]