Opportunity sees its first dust devil
The Mars rover Opportunity has spotted its first dust devil after six-plus years of travel.
Category: Behind The Black
Poor leadership by Obama on NASA
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit today said the following (in recognizing Jeff Foust’s op-ed for Technology Review):
CONGRESS BLOWS IT: Commercial Spaceflight, We Have A Problem. Congress will always choose short-term pork over long-term development unless there’s strong Presidential leadership. But while the Obama space policy is good, the White House hasn’t provided the kind of legislative push it takes to make it work. Without strong leadership, a good policy will always lose out to pork.
Didn’t someone say this already? In fact, didn’t that someone say this more than once?
Your Show of Shows: the clock skit
An evening pause: Yesterday we had a modern animation of a machine that made music. Tonight let’s watch a very different take on a vaguely similar idea, this time to produce comedy. This is a classic skit from Your Show of Shows, Sid Caesar’s variety show from early television. The four performers are, left to right, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coco, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris.
Themis satellites transferred to Moon
Two NASA probes, originally launched to study the Sun and having completed their mission, have had their orbits adjusted so that they can study the Moon instead.
Images show water ice?
Radar images from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter appear to show deposits of approximately 1.6 trillion pounds of water ice on the Moon.
Layoff notices in Florida
The United Space Alliance, which runs shuttle operations for NASA at Cape Canaveral, has announced layoffs roughly 900 effective October 1. Key quote: “Local workforce officials expect that up to 8,000 KSC employees could lose jobs by the time the shuttle program ends.”
Wolf says NASA budget passage bleak
The space war continues. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va) of the House Appropriations committee says that there is little chance the NASA budget will be approved until January.
Pipe Dream by Animusic
An evening pause: Though it might look real, the music machine in this short is animated, a creation of Animusic, a company dedicated to producing animated shorts set to music.
Solar sail conference
Solar sail engineers from around the world gathered in Brooklyn last week for the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing. Ben Diedrich, fellow caver, solar sail expert, and the man behind wiki.solarsails.info, gave two papers. He also emailed me to say that “Japan’s contingent gave several talks – many of which compared analysis of deployment, flight, or steering with actual flight data” of Ikaros. A review of the program [pdf] revealed some fascinating uses for solar sails. I like this paper title the best: “Deflecting Apophis with a flotilla of solar sails.” [ed. Apophis is an asteroid with the potential of hitting the Earth.]
Update: Japanese scientists have now announced that they have been able to adjust Ikaros’s attitude using sunlight.
Another update: Ben Diedrich emailed me the link to read the actual proceedings from the conference. See pg 103 to read the paper on using solar sails to deflect Apophis.
Lichens in space
An experiment flown in space for 10 days by the European Space Agency has found that three species of lichen can survive the hazards of outer space.
Asteroid impact threat
End of the world alert! Scientists have identified an almost half mile wide asteroid with a 1 in 1000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2182.
Russian astronauts lose tools during spacewalk
During a spacewalk at ISS yesterday, two Russian cosmonauts successfully replaced a broken camera and installed new wiring for the recently added Russian Dawn module. They also lost a washer and an “attachment fixture” used to fasten the wiring in place, both of which were spotted floating away.