Nasa Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Daily iPad App: NASA's Earth As Art shows us our beautiful planet

by Kelly Hodgkins (May 17th, 2013)

NASA has a series of excellent educational iOS apps that appeal to adults and kids alike. Most have a strong scientific bent, but if you lean more towards art than science, NASA has an iPad app for you, too. Mixing a little bit of earth and planetary science with a keen eye for art, NASA has ...

NASA and TopCoder want you to create an iPad app for the International Space Station

by Kelly Hodgkins (Feb 19th, 2013)

NASA and TopCoder, a company that hosts programming competitions, is teaming up on a series of contests that'll develop apps for astronauts. One app challenge targets the iPad and will help astronauts keep track of the food they eat while they are working in space. The FIT (Food Intake ...

Cassini HD for the iPad lets you take a free trip to Saturn today

by Mel Martin (Sep 15th, 2012)

I continue to praise the variety of Astronomy apps that are available for iOS. Today, I call your attention to Cassini HD for the iPad, which is usually US $1.99, but is free today only. The app collects more than 800 striking images from the NASA Cassini Mission that did a close flyby of Saturn ...

"Explore" Mars with your iPhone

by Dave Caolo (Aug 15th, 2012)

"This is why you're learning math." Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic points out this immersive, 360º panorama of the martian surface as recorded the by the Curiosity rover. It takes advantage of the iPhone's gyroscope and responds to your movements. Once the page is loaded, hold the iPhone ...

The role of the Mac at NASA and JPL is shown off by Mars Curiosity mission

by Mel Martin (Aug 6th, 2012)

My colleague Steve Sande touched on this subject of all the Macs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an earlier post, and I've been doing some digging to find out more about all the Mac love at our space agency and its field centers. JPL is managed by Caltech, but it falls under NASA's ...

Macs abound at NASA/JPL Mars Curiosity mission control

by Steven Sande (Aug 6th, 2012)

For those of us who stayed up late last night to watch the streaming coverage of the Curiosity rover's landing on Mars, it was a treat to see the huge numbers of MacBooks, iPads, and even iPhones that were in the control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The ...

New NASA app brings spacecraft to life in 3D

by Mel Martin (Jul 12th, 2012)

NASA is no stranger to 3D. It has done some impressive CGI trips into galaxies and nebulae, and of course it has offered some stunning 3D images from the Mars spacecraft. NASA has just released a free iPad and iPhone app called Spacecraft 3D. Here's how it works. You launch the app and then ...

iPads, Angry Birds to travel to International Space Station

by Mel Martin (Oct 26th, 2011)

iPods and iPhones (in Airplane Mode? Spaceship mode?) have traveled to the International Space Station (ISS) via American and Russian launch vehicles. Now you can add the iPad to the list of iDevices that have left the planet. That's the word from Collect Space, which reports that 2 iPads will ...

Daily iPad App: NASA Visualization Explorer

by Kelly Hodgkins (Aug 8th, 2011)

The NASA Visualization app is your window into the world of NASA research. The app presents the latest NASA research news in an easy-to-digest format. Each article is written for the lay person and amateur scientist with images and video to complement the writing. Topics range from space-based ...

5 apps for the armchair astronaut & the final Space Shuttle launch

by Lisa Hoover (Jul 8th, 2011)

Unless you've been living under a rock lately, you know that today's launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, mission STS-135, signals the end of the shuttle program as we know it and the closing of a chapter in American human spaceflight. Weather and ten trillion other mechanical considerations ...

Two iPhones to fly into space on last shuttle mission

by Dave Caolo (Jun 9th, 2011)

The space shuttle Atlantis' final mission into space on July 8, 2011 will also mark a first. Specifically, the first time an iPhone has entered outer space. Two in fact, meant to carry out specially-designed experiments. The iPhone 4s will be running an app called SpaceLab for iOS, designed by ...

SPB TV brings streaming TV to the iPhone and iPad, if you aren't too picky

by Mel Martin (Nov 17th, 2010)

SPB TV Free is a little app that gives you more than 100 free TV channels for your iOS device. You get channels from 17 countries, including a few in the US. The only problem? You may not be interested in the television shows the app makes available. There are English language broadcasts from NHK in ...

Highest-resolution Earth photo looks familiar for a reason

by Dave Caolo (Mar 5th, 2010)

Last month, Gizmodo posted an incredible image from NASA: The most accurate, highest-resolution photo of Earth taken to date. It's stunning, in all of its 2048 x 2048 pixel glory. In fact, there are two images: One showing the Americas and one showing Europe. Both make a great desktop image. ...

A new accessory for your iPhone: a NASA-developed chemical sensor

by Steven Sande (Nov 13th, 2009)

What's better than a handful of sensors for determining if some hostile enemy has set off chemical weapons in a city? How about hundreds of thousands or millions of sensors? If research being done by NASA Ames Research Center under the Cell-All program in the US Department of Homeland Security's ...

Space geeks love MacBook Pros

by Steven Sande (Oct 27th, 2009)

Like a lot of my fellow space geeks, I was watching the live feed from Spaceflight Now this morning for the launch of the Ares 1-X test vehicle. Unfortunately, the launch was scrubbed, but I was happy to see that the three guys doing the coverage this morning were all using MacBook Pros. The ...