Showing posts with label NASA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NASA. Show all posts

Thursday, 16 April 2015

'NASA MESSENGER' spacecraft to crash into Mercury soon

Tech News - The "spacecraft will impact the planet at more than 8,750 miles per hour on the side of the planet facing away from Earth," NASA said in a statement on Thursday.

"Due to the expected location, engineers will be unable to view in real time the exact location of impact," a news agency reported.

Launched in August 2004, MESSENGER traveled 7.9 billion km on a journey that included 15 trips around the sun and flybys of Earth once, Venus twice and Mercury three times.

The spacecraft began orbiting Mercury in March 2011. The four- year mission was blessed with many scientific findings, including one in 2012 that provided compelling support for the hypothesis that Mercury harbors abundant frozen water and other volatile materials in its permanently shadowed polar craters.

It helped test many technological achievements, including the development of a vital heat-resistant and highly reflective ceramic cloth sunshade that isolated the spacecraft's instruments and electronics from direct solar radiation, vital to mission success given Mercury's proximity to the sun.

 
 
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Wednesday, 11 June 2014

When male dolphin fell in love with female researcher

Margaret Howe Lovatt
In a documentary titled 'The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins', Margaret Howe Lovatt has explained what happened when she tried to teach a bottlenose dolphin named Peter how to speak English during a NASA funded experiment in 1965.

Lovatt, then 23, was stationed in US Virgin Islands with a male dolphin where the two of them would eat, bath and sleep together. Peter apparently fell in love with her. Lovatt realized the sea mammal was becoming sexually aroused by her, according to a report.

"Peter liked to be with me. He would rub himself on my knee, my foot or my hand and I allowed that," she was quoted as saying.

"It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch, just get rid of that scratch and we would be done and move on," Lovatt added.

The two did not have sexual intercourse, though Howe admitted the relationship was 'sensual' for her.