NASA invites 150 Twitter followers to Jupiter rocket launch

By Mike Dunn Published August 2, 2011

Are you a fan of all things space-related and follow NASA on Twitter? If so, then you had a chance to win an invite to Florida to watch a real-life NASA launch. As we all know, the space-shuttle program is officially over, so this isn’t a shuttle launch, but it is still a launch. NASA invited 150 of its Twitter followers, from six countries, to take part in this event. The 150 lucky Twitter followers will take part in a Tweetup, and will be able to watch the launch of the Juno spacecraft.

Juno will be hitching a ride on an Atlas V rocket, which will be leaving Cape Canaveral Florida bound for Jupiter. Juno is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter in 2016, and once there it will become a shutter bug. NASA is planning on Juno to take several high-detail pictures of Jupiter and its poles. While there, it will also investigate the gas giant’s interior, atmosphere, and aurora.

The winners will also be able to meet and talk to several of NASA’s top names. One such speaker is Waleed Abdalati, who happens to be the chief scientist at NASA’s headquarters. Besides being a pretty lofty title, we are quite sure that Abdalati is also fairly intelligent, and hopefully can answer most questions lobbed his way. Our advice for the 150 individuals is to study the NPR chart on the shuttle program we discussed recently, so you can have something to talk about with NASA’s head hanchos.

If you want to watch the launch, you can do so on NASA’s official Ustream account. The launch is scheduled for August 4, but they are leaving August 5 open just in case the weather doesn’t cooperate. This isn’t the first time that NASA has invited people to watch a launch via Twitter, so start following them if you would like your chance at watching the next launch.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Mike graduated from University of Arizona with a degree in poetry, and made his big break by writing love sonnets to the…

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Entertainment

AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying

Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."