hugeawesomethings-blog

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Oh, hello again. Nice teeth.

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Spotted in the neighborhood: Huge, awesome, and going to cut your house in half.

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This is about as huge and awesome as anything. Livestream of Earth from the ISS.

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#sundaylazinessreblogwhatevs

vroom vroom mother fucker

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#hugeawesomethrowbackthursday: Fuck-it Bucket

posted by I SPEAK FOR MANKIND on August 1, 2008. Gently edited with caress of giant bucketweels and crawler treads in 2014. permalink.

Hugeawseomethings often trigger a crisis of values on an existential level. "Holy shit, that's sweet!" you may say when gazing upon the hugeawesome power and pathos of an excellently large missile-rocket. "But," you may continue, "this missile-rocket is designed to deliver a cluster of thermonuclear warheads to multiple civilian targets..." Enter Dilemma, stage left (or right, depending on your political philosophy). A case-in-point for the environmentally conscious: the MAN Takraf RB293 Bucket Excavator Bagger 293 (it was bought and given a less charismatic name at some point in the last six years), the largest terrestrial vehicle in human history. This motherfucker is 95 meters tall and 215 meters long. It can dig 10 meters per minute and is capable of moving more than 76,000 cubic meters of coal, rock and earth per day. Translation: hugeawesome strip-miner.

How is one to reconcile this bucket excavator's hugeawesomeness with its blatantly destructive habits?!

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How Oversize Cargo Freight Aircraft Are Made

When a Pregnant Guppy loves a pair of Pratt & Whitney T-34-P-7 turboprop engines very much, and all their precision-milled parts fully consent, a brand-new oversize cargo freight aircraft is born.

At birth, the Aero Spacelines Super Guppy weighs 101,500 lbs.

And when NASA has some wide loads, they can pack their new baby aeroplane with up to 54,000 lbs in space parts through its 110 degree swing out nose. (Explicit internal cross-section of the Guppy below, sensitive individuals may want to avert their eyes.)

Thank you for facilitating space travel, Space Guppy! May you find your plane-mate soon, to make brand new super freight aircraft. Now watch this video.

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#hugeawesomethrowbackfriday (because I forgot on Thursday)

Arecibo Observatory: Listening to the heavens

posted by THE HELENATOR & defiled by I SPEAK FOR MANKIND on August 6, 2008. permalink

"Listening to the heavens"?! What the Fuck kind of shit title is that?! What ever happened to cynicism? Hubris?! Cowering under your monotonously gray cubicle in the face of an existential-crisis-inducing MegaCreation of God Almighty?!

"Listening to the Heavens"....... Sounds like some humanist Jodi Foster Bullshit to me. How about: "HOLY THIRD-WORLD APPROPRIATING SHIT! That's a big goddamned upside-down nipple dish."

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Space Robot Suicide Plunge

NASA's "Take the Plunge" contest is not nearly as sexy as it sounds, given that half of their business is putting humans into space, to do things. But give them some credit, because their social media team turned robot-death-by-gravity-well into cash and valuable prizes.

From NASA: 

LADEE mission managers expect the spacecraft will impact of the moon’s surface on or before April 21. On April 11, ground controllers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will command LADEE to perform its final orbital maintenance maneuver prior to a total lunar eclipse on April 15, when Earth’s shadow passes over the moon. This eclipse, which will last approximately four hours, exposes the spacecraft to conditions just on the edge of what it was designed to survive.

This final maneuver will ensure that LADEE's trajectory will impact the far side of the moon, which is not in view of Earth and away from any previous lunar mission landings. There are no plans to target a particular impact location on the lunar surface, and the exact date and time depends on several factors.

So, accurately guess when the acronym-moon-bot dies, and you'll win a prize. That would have meant a complimentary one-week stay on the ISS, but since NASA is cutting down on cooperation with Russia in lieu of the situation in Ukraine, you'll have to settle for an emailed "commemorative, personalized certificate from the LADEE program."

The submissions deadline is 3 p.m. Pacific time on Friday, April 11.

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Rosetta (or, How to Get to a Comet)

How do you get to a comet whose elliptical orbit extends beyond Jupiter's and inside Mars(es)? Let us count the ways. You'll need approx. 10 years and some very patient Germans. 

The Rosetta spacecraft was launched in 2004 by the ESA, with a mission to intercept comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, orbit and mount it with a little lander (named Philae, somehow) and make science to it, like a boss. It'll be the first to do those things to a comet. Rosetta will arrive about two months from now, in May, 2014.

That's fine and all, but we're here to talk about the journey. Here's what it takes:

Launch from Earth on an Ariane 5, go a bit faster than Earth around the Sun for a while, then lose ground to Earth, get overtaken and get slingshotted (slingshut??) out beyond the orbit of Mars. Spend a couple years out there, get bored, decide to revisit the inner solar system. Get a pinch on the ass by Mars, zip past Earth again then pay attention long enough (7 minutes) to visit asteroid 2867 Šteins. Take some photos, move on. Do another year and a half on a loop out beyond Mars (snooze), another Earth flyby (blah blah blah), visit 21 Lutetia ("a large main-belt asteroid of an unusual spectral type"), and take horrifying space collision vids this time. That was exhausting, so go into hibernation for four years on a long orbital arc that eventually, finally, intersects with aforementioned comet (who can remember its name anymore?). Oh, and don't forget to wake up (try try try to remember bizarre robot space hibernation dreams; probably fail). 

Distance travelled: Over 6 billion kilometers.

This here is a fullscreen interactive 3-D model/video of the entire journey, which we saved for after the text because you really should have clicked on it first, but we didn't want you to leave so soon. (Thanks for waiting, but really, click that). You can even run that thing in real time and re-live the entire trip for the next 14 years of your life. 

What happens next for Rosetta? That's beyond our scope for the moment, folks. 

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A Peanut Butter Problem

Buried in Clovis, NM is the largest stash of discarded peanut butter in the history of ever. It required 58 truckloads to transport the nut butter, totaling 25 tons. That's equivalent to 3.57 African elephants, not currently buried 10 feet under the New Mexico desert:

This peanut butter isn't without company of course: thousands of unpurchased cartridges of the most amazing/awful Atari game of all time, E.T., were dumped there in the 1980s. 

TBH, pretty sure this dog could have taken care of the PB problem. The E.T. game? Nothing could save that.

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Check it on the daily!

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

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It moves.

Revolutionary Telescope Gets Green Light

An 82-foot telescope boasting ten times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope has successfully passed design reviews and is ready to be constructed.

The Giant Magellan Telescope will use a light-collecting mirror surface more than six times the area of current instruments to hunt for distant, potentially habitable planets and let astronomers time travel back to a billion years after the Big Bang.

Read More

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I heard tumblr liked cat gifs. This is definitely awesome, because burritos. And it's definitely huge, because the Carina Nebula, which this cat is burrito-surfing, is ~100 parsecs in radius.

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