CoLab's blog

Check out the great exhibit of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge (NGLLC) in Second Life. This Lunar Lander Challenge is organized by the X Prize Foundation, sponsored by Northrop Grumman, and is one of seven challenges that are part of NASA's Centennial Challenges Program. More info on the NGLLC at: http://space.xprize.org/lunar-lander-challenge

The NGLLC in Second Life is located on the Space Island sim, run by the Space Studies Institute (this is located at the corner of NASA's CoLab and eEducation Islands). The builder and scripter is Adluna Dagger.

WHAT: The fourteenth Luna Philosophie will feature Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at SETI Institute.


Photo by gordmckenna

WHEN WILL WE DISCOVER THE EXTRATERRESTRIALS?
The scientific hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence is now into its fifth decade, and we still haven't uncovered a confirmed peep from the cosmos. For that matter, we still don’t know if life – at any level of intelligence – exists beyond Earth. Could this mean that finding aliens, even if they’re out there, is a project for the ages – one that might take centuries or longer?

New technologies for use in the search for extraterrestrial biology suggest that, despite the continued dearth of hard evidence for life elsewhere or signals from other societies, there is good reason to expect that success might not be far off – that within a few decades we might find evidence of sophisticated civilizations.

Why this is so, what contact would tell us, and what such a discovery would mean, are the subject of this talk on the continuing efforts to establish our place in the universe of thinking beings.

WHEN: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
6:00 - 6:30 PM Socializing
6:30 - 7:30 PM Presentation by Seth Shostak & Discussion
7:30 - 8:00 PM Socializing

WHERE: Yahoo! Brickhouse, 500 3rd St, in San Francisco ( http://upcoming.yahoo.com/venue/59350/ )

WHO: All are welcome!

Please RSVP to shanley@yahoo-inc.com, snacks and drinks will be served but space is limited.

For more information on Luna Philosophie, visit: http://colab.arc.nasa.gov/luna

Unable to attend?
Watch the livestream of this event at http://ustream.tv/channel/lp1 !

One of the best examples of public participation in the space program is the Centennial Challenges program. This is a NASA prize program where NASA has put out seven Challenges to date, and offers prizes to the winners. Anyone can participate, and one of the coolest stories is about Peter Homer, who first won the Astronaut Glove Challenge in 2007.

The Astronaut Glove Challenge continues with more interesting challenges to face-- there's now a focus on "dexterity and flexibility". What's really cool is that Volanz Aerospace Inc./Spaceflight America, the external organization that partners with NASA to run the Challenge event, is asking YOU to give feedback on the Astronaut Glove Challenge.

Go to the Astronaut Glove Challenge website and email organizer Alan Hayes. By giving input on the competition rules, you can make the end competition products more useful to NASA. You can also see a diagram of the nifty "finger torque measurement" and see videos of past competitions.

Best of luck to all the Citizen Engineers out there!!

We've launched a new coworking space in Silicon Valley that's open to the public!


Coworking at SuperHappyDevHouse

Located within NASA Ames Research Center, the space aims to create a welcoming community environment where interested individuals can work, meet, discuss, debate, brainstorm and collaborate.

Myself and the rest of the NASA Ames CoLab team are brainstorming on when to have a potential hackday/coworking open house soon so stay tuned to this blog for an announcement!

To keep updated on future NASA CoLab events, subscribe to our feed.

The next Luna Philosophie event has been launched to the public!



Join us in San Francisco at Yahoo! Brickhouse or watch the livestream around 6:30pm PT on October 16.

October's topic is:
THE DARK SIDE OF THE UNIVERSE
A scientific revolution in our understanding of the universe is under way. In the last decade or so, cosmology has become an observational science that has led to two mysterious observations: about a quarter of the universe is "dark matter," which gravitationally attracts but is otherwise invisible, and about two-thirds is "dark energy," which causes space itself to expand at an ever-increasing rate. That means only a small fraction of the energy in the universe is due to matter that we understand! In this presentation, we will explore the evidence for dark matter and dark energy, and the experiments being developed to investigate their fundamental nature.

Go here for more details on the event and how to RSVP.
See you there!