Alessondra Springmann

The lunar rover from the Apollo 17 mission on the moon’s surface. Where has NASA technology wound up since? [Credit: NASA]Last month, residents of Washington, DC and New York City watched as two Space Shuttles were ferried to their final homes. Even though these orbiters are no longer in service, humans now have a permanent home in space via the International Space Station, and over 500 people from almost 40 countries can say they have flown in space. But for the 6.8 billion residents of Earth who’ve yet to reach orbit, what benefits of space exploration do we see on a daily basis? What do US citizens get from our space agency, NASA?

The short answer is: quite a lot. Let’s take a look at where NASA funding--at present, less than 0.5% of the US federal budget--shows up in our daily lives, and beyond.

Adam Ellsworth, Brinson White and Jason Dunn of Made in Space testing 3D printing in microgravity. Smile, guys! [Photo: madeinspace.us]Made in Space, a Silicon Valley startup located at the NASA Ames Research Center, aims to get a 3D printer into the International Space Station by 2014. Why make parts in orbit? It’s practical: Maintenance of the International Space Station (ISS) currently requires expensive rocket launches to carry replacement parts and tools into space.

With the ending of the US Space Shuttle program, the US currently has to rely on other countries for supplying the space station. If the ISS had a 3D printer and a ready supply of feedstock (the plastic, metal, or even concrete “ink” used by the printer), the most the astronauts would need from Earth is an email with a CAD file of the part they want.

[Photo: UC Berkeley]Looking to improve the performance of a robot designed to emulate a crawling bug, engineers studying biomimicry at UC Berkeley added wings pilfered from a store-bought toy onto a six-legged, 4-inch-long running robot. The original design, dubbed DASH (for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod), was outfitted with wings and renamed DASH+Wings, and used to explore how flapping wings would affect a bug that primarily walks or runs on the surface.

The goal of this project was to help a running or walking robot navigate obstacles, since many robots designed to emulate bug behavior are unstable and have trouble staying upright while climbing down from heights. Perhaps a “running-and-flying” robot would be able to maneuver better than a flightless version.

In June, HTC announced that the era of locked bootloaders would soon be over, and that future devices could have their bootloaders unlocked via a software upgrade. However, there was no word as to whether older devices could be unlocked by their owners.

Just today (Wednesday), HTC posted on their Facebook page that later this month, unlocking support for the HTC Sensation will be provided via a software update, with support for the HTC Sensation 4G and HTC EVO 3D to follow soon.

We all know about Pi Day, that tasty holiday on March 14 where celebrations include reciting digits of Pi and eating pie. At MIT, we ate pizza pie, pine nuts, and dined on dozens of types of sugary and fruity pies. Today, on what’s usually called “2 Pi Day” (do you bake twice as many pies as you usually would?) we’re seeing headlines about “pi being under attack” and the movement to replace pi with another constant... tau?

Why tau instead of pi? We all know that pi (p) is the circumference (C) of a circle divided by its diameter (D):

HTC has some good news for anyone who's wanted to root their Android phones: The company announced late Thursday that it will no longer be locking the bootloaders on its phones. Confirmed via a post on HTC’s Facebook page, CEO Peter Chou said that after listening to customer feedback, the company would provide unlocked bootloaders on HTC devices.

"There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we've listened. Today, I'm confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience," Peter Chou, CEO of HTC.

MIT students are known to be a studious bunch, solving differential equations and soldering all night in lab. But sometimes, this diligent group finds the time to have a little fun by putting up "hacks" across campus. At MIT, hacks aren’t harmful, nefarious “cracks” of computer or security systems; instead, they’re clever pranks or creative performance art intended to amuse, and make people wonder, “How the heck did they do that?”

Today in a main lobby at MIT, a gigantic Nintendo 3DS augmented reality (AR) card appeared hanging from the ceiling. If you haven’t had much time to play with a 3DS yet, it’s a handheld gaming system from Nintendo that does 3D without glasses, social networking, and augmented reality. Point the camera on your 3DS at a special card and the screen will not just show video of the card, it’ll also overlay 3D avatars, known as Miis,` on top of the card and whatever else the camera sees.

[Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington]When NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft left Mercury in 1974, the probe left scientists scratching their heads about the nature of the innermost planet. Why is Mercury so dense? Is its outer core really molten? How does it hold onto its thin, tenuous atmosphere made of helium, sodium, and other lightweight elements?

Last night, NASA’s first spacecraft to this fast-moving planet in almost 40 years arrived in orbit around Mercury to answer these questions and more. Called MESSENGER (for MEcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging), this spacecraft has taken almost seven years, plus two gravitational assists from Venus and three swingbys of Mercury, to finally achieve orbit. Flying directly to Mercury requires too much fuel, so MESSENGER borrowed gravitational energy from Earth, Venus, and Mercury itself before winding up in its current orbit around Mercury.

The latest visualization tool (or toy?) from NASA is a work of art: Called Eyes on the Solar System, this 3D rendering of our cosmic neighborhood lets you explore planets, asteroids, and witness spacecraft encountering comets and moons. Powered by the Unity 3 gaming engine, Eyes provides a stunning view of your favorite celestial bodies from a satellite’s perspective.

Looking for inspiration of where to visit? Check out the Cassini flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan, or any of EPOXI’s encounters with comets (click the “DESTINATION” panel in the lower left). Other panes let you control the date and time, the speed and rate of any encounter with a planet, multimedia (videos and spacecraft images), as well as what objects you’re looking at and how much they’re illuminated (“VISUAL CONTROLS”).

We at Geek Tech have seen some pretty spectacular Kinect hacks, but this latest mashup of a Kinect plus an Android tablet has incredible potential for awesome, portable applications.

The Kinect has been used for all sorts of hacks with traditional computers, but this latest setup has a Kinect working with an Android development tablet. Using openFrameworks and an Armadillo 500 FX Android tablet, HirotakaSter got the table to show the video feed from the Kinect’s camera. While this setup isn’t doing much more than display video at the moment, we’re pretty excited at the prospect of having a portable Android/Kinect system for hacks while on the run.

Frame from an animated GIF showing the solar flare in question. [Photo: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory]That big massive ball of burning hydrogen in the center of our solar system has been getting more and more active as of late--the sun recently had three solar flares explode from the corona, its high temperature plasma atmosphere. Particularly powerful solar flares produce coronal mass ejections, which can reach temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit at the time of explosion and can eventually reach Earth.

We’re lucky to live on this planet: This round, sweet Earth has a magnetic field that protects us terrestrial inhabitants from a good deal of space weather, including high radiation-charged particles emitted from the Sun during these coronal mass ejections (CMEs). That said, these latest three solar flares were the largest in the last four years, and should put on a spectacular light show when they reach us tonight and on Friday. These flares also mark the ramping up of a new solar cycle, which means we should be seeing more and more solar flares in the next few years.

[Photo: Tom Willard]Fans of the British science fiction serial Dr. Who have seen some impressive manifestations of the TARDIS, that famous time- and space-travelling blue police box, used by The Doctor to travel throughout all of space and time. We’ve even seen TARDIS cakes with LEDs that are bigger on the inside than the outside. Lately, a full-sized TARDIS has shown up at a number of university campuses across the US.

First, it landed on the Great Dome at MIT in August (along with a banner that said, "The Doctor: 1 / Harvard: 0"). In early January, this same TARDIS reappeared 3,000 miles away at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, CA (pictured above; photo courtesy Tom Willard) .