asteroids
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NASA discovered that an asteroid named Dinky actually has its own moon
NASA has discovered that an asteroid named Dinky is orbited by a tiny moon, forming a binary asteroid pair. In other words, it’s an even dinkier Dinky.
Retro online gaming service Piepacker adds five Atari classics to catalog
Starting this week, you can play the PlayStation versions of Pong, Asteroid, Breakout, Centipede and Missile Command online with your friends.
Puerto Rico’s Arecibo radio telescope suffers serious damage
A broken cable damaged the Arecibo Observatory, the second-largest radio telescope in the world.
NASA advances lunar crater modeling and asteroid mining projects
NASA doesn't just want to return to the moon by 2024, it also wants to establish a "sustained human presence" and to use the moon as a hub for future Mars exploration. In order to do that, it will need new ideas and technologies, like those solicited and supported by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. Today, NIAC moved two projects to Phase III, the furthest any concepts have made it.
Tesla adds '2048' and Atari’s 'Super Breakout' to its dashboards
Tesla is adding more free games to the dashboard display on Model S, Model X and Model 3 cars. Super Breakout and 2048 are joining other Atari classics Missile Command, Asteroids, Lunar Lander and Centipede, which Tesla added in August. To date, hundreds of thousands of people have played those games, according to the automaker.
NASA announces two new missions to study the early solar system
Right behind yesterday's Explorer mission announcement, NASA has just announced two new Discovery missions to study the very early history of our solar system -- the period about 10 million years after the hydrogen and helium in the sun burst into life. Known as Lucy and Psyche, the two missions will peer back in time by analyzing several metallic asteroids floating in the main asteroid belt and further out in Jupiter's orbit.
Republican congressmen question value of asteroid redirect mission
A pair of Republican congressmen, both of whom sit on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, contacted NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on Tuesday, requesting more information from the space administration about a recent report supporting the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). The ARM program aims to intercept a near-Earth asteroid, grab a boulder from its surface using a robotic spacecraft and then coax said boulder into a stable orbit around the moon where it can be studied at leisure by future manned missions.
NASA's asteroid-bound OSIRIS-Rex launches Thursday
After years of construction and months of rigorous testing, NASA's asteroid-sampling OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft is ready to take off from Cape Canaveral this Thursday, September 8th at 7pm ET. After it leaves the atmosphere on an Atlas V rocket, the spacecraft will take two years to reach its destination, a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. Upon arrival in 2018, OSIRIS will begin an multi-year mission of mapping the 1,650-foot asteroid and bringing home a scoop of carbon-rich space rocks, which researchers believe may hold 4.5 billion-year-old leftovers from the beginning of the solar system and some of the basic building blocks of life. Update (9/8): You can watch NASA's livestream of the launch (scheduled for 7:05PM ET) right here or embedded below.
Deep Space Industries plans to land on an asteroid by 2020
This week, asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries announced detailed plans to launch the first private mission to an asteroid by 2020. The California-based company plans to build a successor to its Prospector-X test craft called Prospector–1, which will land directly on an asteroid as it passes near Earth. Although Prospector–1 won't be bringing back any gold or platinum, the historic mission will map the surface of the asteroid and analyze the rock for resources that could be useful in DSI's long-term plans.
Russia has plans to nuke Earth-bound asteroids, if necessary
From 2012 to 2015, Russia researched ways of deflecting Earth-bound asteroids using nuclear weapons and came up with a best-case scenario, The Telegraph reports. The Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building, an arm of Russia's state-run Roscosmos space agency, worked on the asteroid problem with other countries (including the United States) in a program called NEOShield, which was largely funded by the European Commission. Note that "NEO" in this case stands for "Near-Earth Object," not The One you're probably imagining.
'Asteroids' travels to the Cold War and beyond in 'VEC9'
Asteroids is the quintessential vector arcade game, featuring a stark black background and simple, geometric images representing spaceships, bullets and floating bits of space rock. Now, that visual genre gets a modern upgrade in VEC9, a 3D vector arcade game about a cryogenically frozen USSR pilot who awakens 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and assumes the American military violently overthrew his country's reign. The pilot's mission is to attack major American cities in a spaceship outfitted with a giant laser and a chain gun, as Motherboard describes. VEC9 creators and tech tinkerers Andrew Reitano, Michael Dooley and Todd Bailey created a big, blinking cabinet for VEC9, complete with a massive controller that Motherboard says was originally designed for an M1 Abrams tank. The whole VEC9 shebang -- including retro-styled full-motion video cutscenes -- will be on display at Chicago's Logan Arcade starting November 7th.
Larry Page's asteroid-mining firm launches its first satellite in July
Planetary Resources hasn't had much success getting its asteroid-mining business off the ground, in a very literal sense -- it lost its first satellite, Arkyd-3, in the Antares rocket explosion last year. It's about to get a second try, though. The Larry Page-backed company has announced that its craft's follow-up, Arkyd 3 Reflight (aka Arkyd 3R), is scheduled to launch from the International Space Station in July. While the vehicle will spend just 90 days sending self-diagnostic info before it falls to Earth, it'll serve as a useful test run before the more ambitious Arkyd 6 starts wielding its scientific instruments in December. No, this isn't the long-promised space telescope, but it's an important early step.
New telescope will be a high-resolution window to the universe
That 3D rendering up there is a new telescope from the National Science Foundation that promises to solve the mysteries of the universe -- or at least take some truly big pictures. Fitted with a 3,200 megapixel camera, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be the largest digital camera in the world. Once operational, it will scan the entire night sky a few times a week for ten years and is expected to provide scientists unprecedented access to previously inscrutable parts of the cosmos. The camera will literally shed light on dark energy that is believed to accelerate the expansion of the universe, but has long evaded definitive probes. Apart from capturing images of exploding supernovae at an unfathomable distance, it can detect and track asteroids in our planet's vicinity.
NASA wants your help hunting for asteroids
"Asteroid hunters." It sounds like some Hollywood blockbuster / straight-to-DVD "classic" that already exists, but now you, yes you, can be one... from your PC. NASA has launched a desktop app that recruits civilians to help identify asteroids from telescope photography, helped by a special asteroid algorithm. Scientists announced the desktop app at SXSW during in a panel discussion where they elaborated on how muggles citizen scientists were helping their efforts to identify and tag asteroids. The app is another collaboration between NASA and Planetary Resources. (It's apparently all under a Space Act agreement, which is the coolest act we've heard of in a while.)
A modern-day Asteroids could combine space and survival
With Atari back from the brink of extinction once again, the publisher has shifted its focus from a game maker to a license holder that finds development partners to create modern-day interpretations of its library of classic franchises. In an interview during PAX Prime 2014, Atari CEO Fred Chesnais explored his ideas for a modern-day Asteroids experience, saying it could combine the franchise's classic gameplay with survival concepts found in popular titles like Day Z. "So for Asteroids, the initial game was – you remember the game – you get crushed by the asteroids. So what happens now? You land on the asteroid. And then what you have to do is you have to survive on the asteroid. So you can have an Asteroids game, which is basically a survival game in space," Chesnais tells Joystiq.
'Breakout,' 'Centipede' and 'Asteroids,' now in your Denny's app
Denny's -- or as Denny's and no one else calls it, "America's Diner" -- has partnered with Atari to create...interesting versions of classic games Breakout, Centipede and Asteroids. The games are free, and available now in both iOS and Android app stores via the Denny's app. Whether you can stomach what they've become in the transition -- from classic games to a "retro, remixed promotion" for a trio of new dishes at a chain of diners -- is the question you'll have to ask yourself. Breakout becomes "Take-out"; Asteroids becomes "Hashteroids"; and Centipede becomes "Centipup." There's a trailer too that's only slightly soul-crushing.
Planetary Resources wants your help spotting asteroids
Eager to help Planetary Resources look for asteroids and bring humanity that much closer to space mining? Well, it's time to get cracking. The company has launched Asteroid Zoo, a site that relies on crowdsourcing (i.e. you) to both find rocks in the void and train computers to do the same. It's pretty straightforward -- all you do is look at image sets from the Catalina Sky Survey and mark any asteroids or artifacts.
Titanfall's ode to 8-bit gaming is proof that robots make everything better
Need further evidence that robots improve just about everything? EA and Respawn are more than happy to provide it. They've launched Titanfall Arcade, a promotional gaming website that thrusts Titanfall's namesake giant machines into classic 8-bit Atari titles. The only working game at present is an Asteroids remake, but it proves the point -- the typically nerve-wracking space shooter becomes easy once a Titan's weaponry comes into play. Tributes to Centipede and Missile Command are coming in the future. The arcade is primarily meant to whet your appetite ahead of Titanfall's release next week, but we'd say it's worth a visit even if you don't plan to buy the game -- it's a nostalgic gaming experience without the frustrating difficulty levels that often come along for the ride.
Titanfall Arcade kicks some Asteroids
What do you get when you mix the titans from Titanfall with Atari's popular retro game Asteroids? You get Titanfall's titans in Asteroids silly, what else could you possibly have expected? Respawn Entertainment recently thought it fitting to launch a small, free retro game portal dubbed "Titanfall Arcade" to promote its upcoming FPS, starting with an Asteroids clone. The browser-based flash game plays exactly like it sounds: After dropping a titan into a flat black space setting, players point with their cursors to shoot the classic outlines of space debris, racking up a high score after firing off charged beam shots. The game makes for a fun little excursion while your boss is looking away, to be sure. The other two Titanfall Arcade games that will be available to play sometime in the near future are spoofs on Missile Command and Centipede, the former sounding all too appropriate for a mech to be involved in. Titanfall launches next week on Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC. [Image: Respawn Entertainment]
Planetary Resources and NASA team up to crowdsource the search for asteroids
Planetary Resources really wants to mine asteroids for valuable materials, but first it has to find them. So the company is partnering with NASA on a crowdsourcing project that would put the American public to work identifying and tracking near-Earth-objects (NEOs). All the data generated will be open sourced and made publicly available on the web. The effort will center on a series of challenges and contests designed to lure in citizen scientists and the results will be reviewed by Planetary Resources. Obviously, the company will be looking for mineable hunks of space rock, but it will also be giving back to the scientific community by using the data it collects to improve algorithms for detecting asteroids. And, obviously, the more of those we're able to detect and track, the less likely we are to be caught off guard by a meteorite apocalypse. To be notified when the program kicks off, sign up for more info at the Planetary Resources site.
