"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow."
If the preceding statement brings to mind the ultimate in nerdom, you'd be mistaken—they're the words of pioneering astronaut Neil Armstrong in a 2000 speech. But though Armstrong was more badass than pencil-necked geek, he certainly used one of geekery's most powerful tools—the humble slide rule.
It's already pretty amazing that a computer with 64 Kb of memory was able to put a man on the Moon. But what's even more amazing is what NASA managed to accomplish without computers. That's where the slide rule comes in (oh, and it was black female mathematician, Katherine G. Johnson, who calculated the Apollo 11 trajectory to the Moon!).
A slide rule is a kind of computer itself—the very basic, very analog kind. Though it looks like a ruler, it's really a way to quickly multiply, divide, and calculate logarithms and other functions. Engineers used slide rules to process rocket propulsion data, perform everyday calculations, and come up with coordinates. And a Pickett slide rule was standard issue for Apollo program astronauts, who used them in space.
Perhaps the most impressive use of the slide rule was during the Apollo 13 crisis. Engineers had to recalculate data to guide the crew safely back to Earth—and they had to do it quickly. Richard Ogle describes how it went down:
NASA had at its disposal whole banks of sophisticated computers, of course, but these were not programmed to do the basic calculations [Commander Jim Lovell] needed. So the engineers reverted to that most mundane pre-pocket calculator workhorse, the slide rule….Had the engineers at Mission Control been forced to do the necessary calculations on paper, Apollo 13 might well have missed the trajectory needed to bring it back to earth altogether. Instead the slide rule, designed specifically to exploit human beings' highly developed visual acuity, allowed them to perform a set of complicated calculations in seconds.
By 1976, the pocket calculator had rendered the slide rule completely obsolete. Today, the International Space Station relies on over 1.5 million lines of code to run the United States segment alone. That's a lot of sliding calculations.
SEE ALSO: There's more to this beautiful space image than meets the eye
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SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - A fireball spotted streaking across the night sky late on Monday in the western United States was almost certainly the body of a rocket used by China in December to launch a satellite, an astronomer said Tuesday.
Normally when a geomagnetic storm hits Earth, the radiation that does penetrate our magnetic field interacts with Earth's atmosphere, igniting the 
Last August, 
By estimating how much it would cost to send enough rocket propellant into space that could fuel a rocket on Mars, Hoffman estimates that an oxygen-producing machine 100 times the size of MOXIE could save future Mars missions billions of dollars.
"We're not storing the oxygen for any length of time," Hoffman told Business Insider in a later interview. MOXIE will only hold on to the oxygen for long enough to measure its purity and then release it back into the atmosphere.
The way MOXIE does this is to basically run like a fuel cell in reverse. To work, fuel cells convert a type of fuel, such as gasoline, into electricity through a chemical reaction that often requires the presence of oxygen.
Dubayah describes this land-bound carbon as a missing link in the carbon cycle. Much of it is unaccounted for, but not unlike dark matter, scientists know it's there.
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At any one time, GEDI will shoot three beams across several tracks each 500 meters apart. "We'll take those facts and we'll make estimates of the distribution of canopy height within 500 meter cells," said Dubayah.
Because of the ISS's orbit, only surfaces between 50th parallel north and 50th parallel south will be subject to GEDI's scrutiny. The instrument can be pointed slightly left or right to maximize coverage, but that still leaves out most of Canada and Russia's boreal (or taiga) forests, which according to TV series 
"What we would really want, though, is to have our own satellite in space so we that don't have this kind of limitation, and so that we can cover boreal forests," said Dubayah.
Alpha Centauri is the closest star to Earth besides our sun. It floats in space about 4.37 light years from Earth, and would therefore take 4.37 years for a spacecraft traveling at the speed of light to get there.
"The massive galaxy cluster focuses the supernova light along at least three separate paths," Jens Hjorth, from the Dark Cosmology Centre in Denmark and a co-author on the paper, said in a 
Although astronomers can see all four spots of light at the same time right now, it won't always be the case.
The poll in December also asked if Americans thought we should be allocating billions of dollars to make manned missions to Mars or the moon a reality. Only 42% thought it was a good idea.
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