Categories
Space

Godspeed Hubble

Hubble Released Atlantis STS 125

This video is the actual release of Hubble as well as the shuttle backing away from the Hubble telescope. It is best watched in HQ and Full Screen. It’s slightly shaky at times and a little long, but it’s got some great shots of Hubble up close. The Big Picture Blog also has a great set of pictures from the mission.

Humans likely will never again approach Hubble. At some point in the future a robotic mission will likely attach to the newly installed Soft Capture Mechanism and safely de-orbit Hubble guiding it into the Pacific away from any humans. That’s not likely until at least 2014, hopefully longer. Hubble has already outlived it’s original life expectancy thanks to previous shuttle visits. With the latest servicing hopefully there are still some great years ahead.

[Via: Bad Astronomy]

Categories
Audio/Video Space

Tour The International Space Station

There is a very cool tour of the International Space Station available on YouTube as a set of four videos:

There’s no award to be won for camera work as it’s pretty shaky and quick moving not to mention occasionally hard to follow but it’s a very good tour of something you rarely see more than a snapshot of. It also gives you a chance to appreciate the size of the whole thing. Noteworthy is you can see some of the design differences between modules built by different countries. The Russian built parts look pretty retro compared to the rest of the station. Also interesting is the use of all wall space since there’s no floor or ceiling. It’s packed in there.

Categories
Audio/Video Space

NASA Constellation Program

NASA Constellation Ares V/Altair

NASA has posted a very cool video showing the status, and some renderings of the Constellation program. The parallels to the Apollo program are obvious and intentional as they are trying to minimize cost and risk by utilizing what was learned a generation ago. In just 3 years they seem to have done a lot of work, though there’s still years to go until the first flight, and a while longer until we’re looking at a return to the moon. That’s of course assuming that the program isn’t canceled or modified by then.

Altair in a sense is a modernized enlarged version of the lunar lander and Orion is in many ways a larger Apollo Command Module.

The Ares V rocket is a real monster of a rocket. It will be able to lift more than even the Saturn V (famous for being the rocket that shot the Apollo missions into space). Interestingly the Saturn V used the J-2 rocket for the second and third stage (the first used the F-1). The Ares V will use the J-2X rocket which is a modernized version for it’s second stage.

Categories
Space Tech (General)

UNIX Apocalypse

Apparently Unix time/POSIX time will hit a rather impressive 1234567890 in the next few days. What is even more interesting is that this is happening on Friday the 13th, 2009. You can find out when it will happen in your local time by running perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'. Just another milestone on the way to Y2K38.

As a sidenote, on Friday April 13, 2029 99942 Apophis will have a close encounter with earth.

Yea it’s superstition, but it sure is fun 😉 .

[Via Slashdot]

Categories
Space

STS-125 Preparations

The Big Picture Blog has a great series of photos for STS-125, the Space Shuttle Atlantis mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s just a collection of NASA pictures, but the ones selected are really great.

STS-125 Space Shuttle Atlantis Engine Installed

Categories
Space

It Must Be Ice

Phoenix has found ice on Mars:

June 19, 2008 — Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

“It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do that.”

You can see an image here. Awesome.

This is pretty historic. The US has hopes of putting a man on Mars sometime in the 2030 time frame (well after a return to the moon). Water on Mars will likely have an impact on how that mission is designed, and possibly it’s success.

Mars has ice caps, that’s been known for a long time. Subterranean ice was suspected, and now confirmed.

Categories
Apple Mozilla Space

Mac Running Firefox 2 At NASA

Asa’s got a blog post about Firefox 2 being used at NASA for the Mars Phoenix Lander.

Bonus: on a Mac.

When you’ve got to visit foreign worlds, and demand the best, Firefox and Mac OS X deliver.

Categories
In The News Space

Night Launch Of Discovery

I noticed this last night, but apparently I wasn’t the only one as Robert Gale over at A Welsh View and Digg also agree that this is one amazing picture of the shuttle launch. The comments on Digg also point out a few other pictures from this and another launch that are similar, as well as pinpoint (by Google Maps) where the pic was taken.

Of course NASA has more, including some in high resolution. Something about a rocket at night makes for some great pictures.

Categories
Funny Space

Milky Way Bar

According to scientists there is a bar in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Here’s a rendering of it:
Milky Way Galaxy
AP Photo

Here’s what was already known about the topic:
Milky Way Bar
Mars Company

All I can say is “yummy”.

Categories
In The News Space

Speaking of doomsday…

Just read this interesting article on CNN regarding the Quake from the other day.

“It causes the planet to wobble a little bit, but it’s not going to turn Earth upside down”

Now if that doesn’t just send a chill down your spine… nothing will.

The power of mother nature is just beyond comprehension. Every time we think we have an idea of what earth can do, it decides to teach us a lesson.

In other news… it now appears the asteroid won’t hit us.