Contact was quickly lost today soon after a hypersonic glider was released by its rocket launcher during a test flight. More here.
Japan has revised its tsunami warning system following the March 11 earthquake/tsunami.
A new study of the glaciers of the Himalayas by the Indian Space Research Organization and the Geological Survey of India has found that, based on satellite data, 2184 were retreating, 435 were advancing, and 148 showed no change.
It is refreshing that the scientists and politicians involved in India refused to cite global warming as a cause, referring instead to the “natural cyclic process”. As India’s former environment minister Jairam Ramesh noted, “There is no doubt that the general health of the Himalayan glaciers is worsening, but the truth is incredibly complex.”
The science team for the rover Opportunity have released their first image taken from the rim of Endeavour Crater.
Since this picture looks south from Spirit Point less than a football field’s distance from the rim, it appears to look into the crater, the mountains on the right being the crater’s rim. What looks like a debris field running across the center of the image looks to me to be a combination of exposed patches of bedrock and boulders on the plateau above the rim. For the scientists, those boulders will be the prime research targets, as they are possibly ejecta produced at crater impact and could therefore be material thrown out from deep within the Martian crust.
You can’t make this stuff up: Michelle Malkin points out that the logo created by Smithsonian’s Department of Innovation shows a gear arrangement that simply can’t function in the real world.
Check out the logo. 3 interlocking gears arranged in this fashion will not move in any direction. They are essentially locked in place. Which when you think about it, is a perfect analogy of today’s government!
The comments on the Department of Innovation’s own webpage are hilarious as well:
Perhaps this should be the new logo for Congress….since no motion could come from this arrangement.
Boeing unveiled its 787 Dreamliner airplane on Saturday after years of delay.
Virgin Galactic’s suborbital shuttle: Sydney to London in 4 hours.
I’ve been told that there are engineering reasons why SpaceShipTwo could not make this flight. Nonetheless, the possibility is quite alluring.
Maybe this is why NASA has been stalling about releasing its plans: The Congressionally-designed moon rocket, what I call the program-formerly-called-Constellation, is estimated to cost $38 billion to complete.
Opportunity is now less than 400 feet from the rim of Endeavour Crater.
After a delay slightly under one hour, the Jupiter probe Juno has lifted off. Check here for updates on its status.
The north pole of Mars in summer: the dry ice is gone, leaving an icecap of water only.
Stand by for space weather: three coronal mass ejections were released by the sun in the past few days and are aimed directly at the earth. The first hit tonight, without doing much damage.
Though it is important to prepare for these solar storms, don’t expect them to do much harm. Power companies use the warnings to protect their grids. What you can expect is an increased chance of seeing the aurora at lower latitudes.
A truck 400 feet long with 192 wheels crosses California to Utah.
Boeing has now officially chosen the Atlas 5 rocket to launch is manned capsule.
Two Russians have completed a spacewalk today at ISS. They not only prepared the station for future Russian upgrades, they released an amateur radio microsat.
Cost issues might force Europe to downsize its 2016 Mars mission.
The Atlas 5 is the rocket that Boeing, Blue Origin, and Sierra Nevada plan to use to get astronauts into orbit.
A lack of U.S. government interest in a privately designed satellite refueling technology has caused the company to pull back its plans.
MDA had signed a contract with the communications satellite company Intelsat to refuel some of its orbiting satellites, but needed additional customers to make a go of it. It had hoped the U.S. Defense Department would show interest, but they have not.
This is exactly where the government should be investing its capital, and that it is not tells us a lot about the real lack of sincerity behind the Obama administration’s claims that it wants to encourage private space. I also suspect that the turf war with satellite companies and defense contractors helped discourage Defense Department interest.
A look at the more than 450 tourists who have paid a deposit to Virgin Galactic to fly in space.
They include comedian Russell Brand, Dallas star Victoria Principal, film director Bryan Singer, designer Philippe Starck, scientist Professor Stephen Hawking, property developers the Candy brothers, and PayPal developer Elon Musk.
The drought in Texas has uncovered in a lake a possible piece from the destroyed shuttle Columbia. More here.
Chris Bergin at NASAspaceflight.com today wrote a report on the four companies NASA is subsidizing to build manned capsules. The status of each company tells us something of whether they can eventually provide the United States with a replacement for the shuttle, and do it soon. Let’s take a look at each.
» Read more
The Dawn science team today released what they are calling “the first full-frame image” of Vesta. The image is shown below the fold.
The picture was taken from 3,200 miles, and shows a pockmarked irregularly shaped world. While many features that resemble the Moon (the craters, the rays radiating out from those craters), that Vesta itself is not spherical makes it very much unlike the Moon. It is probably going to take scientists several months at least to decipher the data they are getting and come up with some concrete conclusions about this strange dwarf planet.
» Read more
The story of Hayabusa, the Japanese space probe that was the first to successfully return material from an asteroid despite serious technical failures, has now inspired three major movies.
Could this weird lunar crater be the crash site for Lunar Orbiter 2?
Wondering why there have been no recent test flights of SpaceShipTwo? Virgin Galactic is taking a summer break.
Two modified off-the-shelf 3-D printers have passed their first zero gravity tests for making tools in space.
Tiangong-1 is not a space station hub.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released this picture yesterday of what the Orbiter’s scientists have labeled “The crazy floor of Hellas Basin.” Below you can see a cropped image of only one part of the large higher resolution image. The NASA caption says that the wild colors probably “indicate that diverse minerals are present,” meaning that any settlers of the red planet will probably take a close look at this location with the reasonable hope of finding the resources they need to colonize a planet.
To me, these colors also indicate that this place on Mars would probably one of its most popular tourist spots. As I look at the image my eye instinctively wants to trace out the best trail route along the ridges and down into the gullies in order to give hikers the best view of this colorful terrain.
