Funfetti Cheesecake Bars

Full Venus and Crescent Moon Rise via NASA

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Hati and Skoll

Finished :D

Space Lettuce in the White House Kitchen Garden

While most people plant gardens on Earth, we’re working to cultivate one in space!

On April 5, the First Lady welcomed students from across the country as well as NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman to the White House Kitchen Garden.

While there, they planted various produce, including the same variety of lettuce that will be sent to the International Space Station on the April 8 SpaceX cargo launch.

These seeds were prepared and packaged for both the First Lady’s garden, as well as the batch headed up to space station. “Outredgeous” Red Romaine Lettuce and “Tokyo bekana” Chinese Cabbage will soon be growing in both gardens!

Why do we grow plants in space?

Our Veggie plant growth system on the space station provides lighting and nutrient supply for a space garden. It supports a variety of plant species that can be cultivated for educational outreach, fresh food and even recreation for crew members on long-duration missions.

When crews travel farther into space, they will need a self-sustaining life support system, and that means growing their own food.

How do we grow plants in space? Here’s a resource for “Space Gardening 101”.

Want to see the space station seeds launch? You can watch Friday’s SpaceX cargo launch live online starting at 3:30 p.m. EDT, with launch scheduled for 4:43 p.m.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Stephen Hawking Is Building Thousands Of Tiny Spaceships To Find Intelligent Life

When asked what extraterrestrial intelligent life might look like, Hawking answered, "Judging from the election campaign, definitely not like us."

World famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced Tuesday their newest attempt to find extraterrestrial life: a project called Breakthrough Starshot.

“Today we commit to the next great leap in the cosmos,” Hawking told reporters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. “Because we are human and our nature is to fly.”

Hawking said the goal of Breakthrough Starshot was to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to us, within a generation by using thousands of tiny spaceships.

Astronomers believe an Earth-like planet could exist within the “habitable zones” of Alpha Centauri, located 25 trillion miles away. It is therefore the most likely place to find life or even, as Hawking said, a possible new home for future humans.

Breakthrough Starshot’s spacecrafts, which they call “nanocrafts,” will be a gram-scale computer chip that will include “cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation and communication equipment,” Avi Loeb, a Harvard scientist involved in the operation told reporters.

A rocket would deliver a “mother ship” carrying a thousand or so of the nanocrafts into space. Once in orbit, the crafts would be propelled with thin sails and hyper-powerful laser beams shot from Earth into the universe to explore and discover. There the crafts would take pictures of their surroundings, which would take around four years to be sent back to earth.

The nanocrafts would travel at around 20% of the speed of light, Loeb said. At that rate it would be possible to reach Alpha Centauri in around 20 years, and the potentially habitable planets within 70. Using the best currently existing technology, it would take some 78,000 years.

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