NASA is hosting a challenge to build a smartwatch app that will allow astronauts in space to easily access information and tools.

For as long as there have been humans in space, there have been watches accompanying them on their wrists, with the most famous being the Omega Speedmaster worn by NASA’s astronauts. Now, with the age of the smartwatch upon us, astronauts may be strapping something new to their wrists.

A space-faring smartwatch would offer more than the stopwatch and counter functions of the manual-wind Speedmaster, as classy as that is. NASA has posted a contest to Freelancer requesting a smartwatch app that could be used by astronauts in space, with a reward of $1,500 for the winning app.
Continue reading NASA wants you to design a smartwatch app for astronauts. →

As recent events have reminded us, space is hard. NASA had quite the scare of the weekend that looked at first like yet another reminder of this inescapable fact. The New Horizons probe, which is just days away from its rendezvous with Pluto, suddenly lost contact with mission control. After a gut-wrenching hour of waiting, the probe came back online, but what happened? NASA is putting all the pieces together, but it looks like everything is going to be okay.

New Horizons was launched nearly a decade ago on a mission to study the planet Pluto. Yes, it was still a planet when New Horizons launched. Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet several months later, but that doesn’t make the mission any less important. Pluto is still the first ever discovered Kuiper Belt object and its (relatively) large size compared to other objects in that region of space means that it has a system of small moons. It’s a perfect place to gather lots of data in a single mission.
Continue reading New Horizons probe lost communication for an hour over the weekend, but everything is probably fine. →