Facing a launch window that ends December 18, the next rover mission to Mars was damaged last week upon arriving at the Kennedy Space Center.
What the hell? In signing the guestbook at Westminster Abbey today, Obama dated his comments 24 May, 2008.
The next budget negotiations have started, and so has the squealing: Republicans propose cutting 12 percent of FDA’s budget.
Note that this would give the FDA a budget of $2.2 billion in 2012, about the same as its 2008 budget. Hardly painful if you ask me.
Video: Is it a blimp? Is it a plane? It’s both!
There is a pattern here: Gasoline prices by county.
Another Soyuz upgrade in the works.
Soyuz TMA-20 lands safely in Kazakhstan.
The United Kingdom’s Skylon spaceplane has passed a key European Space Agency review.
I’ve seen hundreds of these kinds of stories over the years. Skylon looks cool, and would be revolutionary if built. We shall see if it actually happens.
A hint at what today’s images of the station and shuttle, taken from the Soyuz capsule, will look like.
Satellite monitoring of the new Iceland volcano eruption.
More on the new Kepler results: Lots of multiple planet systems.
An evening pause: Peter, Paul, & Mary singing Arthur Sullivan’s “I have a song to sing o” in Australia.
Republican Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty today called for phasing out ethanol subsidies — in Iowa.
We need more candidates like this, willing to say these kinds of things face-to-face with the very people who benefit from the funding.
New results from Kepler.
A paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph preprint website has taken a close look at identifying the best nearby asteroids ideal for mounting a manned mission. The conclusion: our survey of such asteroids is very incomplete (only 65 known), and due to their location in Earthlike orbits they are very difficult to study.
Ultra-low delta-v NEOs are not readily found. Their closely Earth-like orbits mean that most of the time they are in the daytime sky, as seen from the Earth, and so are effectively undetectable. As they approach within <1AU of the Earth they start to lie near quadrature, and so come into the dawn or dusk sky on Earth. The strong scattered sunlight background makes optical surveys toward the dawn or dusk much less sensitive and, in practice, surveys do not look in these directions, preferring to observe where the sky is dark, within 45 degrees, and at most 60 degrees, of the anti-Sun, opposition, direction. As a consequence the lowest delta-v NEOs are undercounted by current surveys, and the factor by which they are undercounted is not yet known.
The paper proposes building a dedicated unmanned infrared mission and placing it in a Venus-like orbit where it would be better placed to see these difficult but important objects.
Though the data is sketchy in places, it appears there has been no decline in the polar bear population for the past four years.
An excellent analysis of Obama’s Middle East speech, and why the reaction to it has been so hostile.
The crisis, then, was caused by three factors: The ignorance of the Obama Administration over the issues involved; Obama’s chronic lack of friendliness toward Israel; and his refusal to recognize the threat from revolutionary Islamism.
Our government in action: No restrooms were included in the soon-to-open 9/11 memorial at ground zero.
The nonprofit foundation running the $508 million project is expecting millions of visitors from across the globe to flock to lower Manhattan when it opens this year on the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. But there won’t be a single toilet available on the eight-acre green plaza — a planning oversight now raising concerns in closed-door meetings.
Analysis has shown that the damaged shuttle tile on Endeavour is not a problem for re-entry.
Grimsvotn, Iceland’s most active volcano, has started a new eruption, the first since 2004.
Images of Robert Bigelow’s ambitious private space station plans.
Local authorities warn gun owners that they will be “inconvenienced” if they carry unconcealed handguns legally in Philadelphia.
Or to put it another way, the police have decided they can harass citizens who happen to be obeying the law.
All your Moon rocks are belong to us: A NASA sting nets a woman offering to sell a Moon rock for $1.7M.
The departing Soyuz crew will do a photo-op fly around on Monday to photograph the completed station with a docked shuttle.
Damaged shuttle tile to get closer look.
Chinese journalists were barred from all official press areas during the Endeavour launch.
A NASA spokesperson says the agency was simply following instructions in last month’s 2011 spending bill that averted a government-wide shutdown. The legislation prohibits NASA from using any resources to host visits by a Chinese official to any NASA facility as well as for collaborations with any Chinese government entity. The Chinese journalists work for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, and thus are considered government employees.
