Chang’e 3 and Yutu – The tale of a beautiful goddess and her rabbit on the Moon.
In this case, the goddess and rabbit are Chinese robots exploring the Moon for science. The launch is scheduled for 1:30 am Monday in China, which is 12:30 pm Eastern Sunday in the U.S.
Can’t light a Falcon 9 without a spark.
The article is an interesting analysis of why Thursday’s Falcon 9 launch was scrubbed. They are aiming to try again Monday evening.
India’s first Martian orbiter, Mangalyaan, successfully fired its engines today to leave Earth orbit and head to Mars.
Finding out what’s in it: A mother with multiple sclerosis has lost her health insurance because of Obamacare.
She will likely face an IRS audit now as well, since she has gone public with her story. Can’t have these little people speaking bad of our great leader.
We’re here to help you: The Federal Trade Commission goes after piano teachers.
[T]he MTNA has existed since 1876 solely to advance the cause of music study and support music teachers. The 501(c)(3) has about 22,000 members, nearly 90% of them piano teachers, including many women who earn a modest living giving lessons in their homes. The group promotes music study and competitions and helps train teachers. Not exactly U.S. Steel.
The association’s sin, according to the feds, rested in its code of ethics. The code lays out ideals for members to follow—a commitment to students, colleagues, society. Tucked into this worthy document was a provision calling on teachers to respect their colleagues’ studios, and not actively recruit students from other teachers.
Such evil. Thank god we have Washington bureaucrats around to stamp it out!
Scott Walker’s epic battle to beat the unions in Wisconsin.
When they and Democratic legislators failed to prevent passage of Act 10 [the law that defanged the unions], they tried to defeat — with a scurrilous smear campaign that backfired — an elected state Supreme Court justice. They hoped that changing the court’s composition would get Walker’s reforms overturned. When this failed, they tried to capture the state Senate by recalling six Republican senators. When this failed, they tried to recall Walker. On the night that failed — he won with a larger margin than he had received when elected 19 months earlier — he resisted the temptation to proclaim, “This is what democracy looks like!”
Read it. It describes the way our country can defeat the fascists.
The competition heats up: Argentina to begin testing its own rocket for satellite launches before the end of 2013.
A Progress freighter was manually docked with ISS today when its automatic docking system suffered a malfunction 200 feet from the station.
This freighter was using a new rendezvous radar system, and had spent two extra days approaching the station to do rendezvous tests. What failed has not yet been released.
An evening pause: Let’s have a taste of some ancient now lost culture.
The Falcon 9 rocket had an abort at launch today at 5:39 Eastern.
The rocket is safe on the launchpad. They are assessing the situation. SpaceX has a remarkably good record of launching quickly and successfully after a launch abort, sometimes within an hour.
The countdown has been reset for a 6:44 pm Eastern launch, the latest they can in their launch window, and has resumed. You can watch it live here.
It appears that they have resumed the countdown, even as they continue to assess, so that if all is well they will be able to launch within their window. This means however they are not yet go for launch.
They now say they are go for launch, even as they assess. In addition, their customer, SES, has given them 20 more minutes on their launch window.
I just love how SpaceX seems to always have an abort-at-launch whenever I am free to watch. I think this is the fourth abort-at-launch nail-biter I have seen.
They have aborted the countdown again at T-48 seconds. They have also scrubbed for the day. It appears they had not completed their assessment of the original abort and decided to scrub. The next launch attempt date is not yet known.
Another state tells Obama that they have to follow the law, even if it is a horrible one like Obamacare.
Though this conclusion is not final, it appears that Comet ISON was destroyed today in its close fly-by of the Sun.
A sad end to what has been a cometary disappointment. First spotted while it was very far from the Sun, astronomers thus hoped that Comet ISON would blaze brightly when it got closer. Instead, it hardly brightened at all during its journey inward, barely reaching naked eye visibility in the last week. Now it appears to be gone forever.
Scientists will gain some knowledge from this comet, as it was a first time visitor to the inner solar system and thus provides information about the solar system’s beginnings. Nonetheless, for those of us that enjoy watching the beautiful things the heavens give us, this comet will always remain a dud.
