Final Flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour

The Space Shuttle Endeavour took it’s last flight last weekend on the back of a Boeing 747 to Los Angeles to take its place in the California Science Center. Here are a couple of videos of the last flight that I found on Gizmodo commemorating the occasion.

The first video is a time lapse of the shuttle being mounted to the transport plane:

 

The second video is high speed footage of the landing at LAX under the escort of a couple of FA-18 Hornets:


Shuttle Endeavour: A piece of space history flies by in slow motion
from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.

Sources: YouTube user DailyOnTech via Gizmodo and Vincent Laforet on Vimeo also via Gizmodo

Acrylic Hybrid Rocket

Check out this a video from Ben Krasnow on YouTube. This is the first I’ve heard of him, but he seems to be a tinkerer and a maker based on the rest of his channel. Here he’s demonstrating a hybrid rocket engine that’s fueled by acrylic and gaseous oxygen that he built himself. It makes for a super cool demonstration because he’s able to throttle the combustion process with the oxygen valve and you can see the burn happen through the clear acrylic. The engine is incredibly simple and amazing at the same time. Building and playing with one of these really should be integrated into a school curriculum somewhere if we’re serious about jump starting our Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education. This is the stuff that captures peoples’ imaginations which then get crushed when they go to college and have to spend all night doing over-idealized calculations on hilariously impractical situations like cooling a live electrical wire in oil.


Source: Ben Krasnow on YouTube

Mars Curiosity Descent Remastered in HD

It seems the Mars Curiosity Rover is inspiring a lot of fan works. The first one was the interactive panoramic of the Gale Crater made by combining the images beamed back with Google street view. Now we have a remastered high definition version of the rover’s descent into the atmosphere thanks to producer Bard Canning. He went back and increased the frame rate from 4 to 30 using interpolation and enhanced the colors and detail frame by frame.


Source: Bard Canning on YouTube via Gizmodo

Curiosity Rover Panoramic of the Gale Crater on Mars

Andrew Bodov of 360 Cities took the 360 degree color image of the Gale Crater sent back by NASA’s Curiosity Rover from Mars and turned it into an interactive panoramic similar to Google Maps Street View. You can click and drag to look around and there’s even a pretty good view of the rover itself:


Mars Panorama – Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 2 in New Mexico

Source: 360 Cities via IO9