This talk from the SpaceUp Ignite series argues that Space is Boring -- or at least, manned spaceflight as presented to the public by NASA. Discuss.
Strangely, the speaker hardly discusses Mars rovers, other robotic planetary exploration, or space telescopes. Given that the shuttle program is almost finished, with no replacement in sight, that seems strange.
Need to spice up your local museum, town square, or megamall? NASA has slashed prices on the soon-to-be-retired space shuttles Atlantis and Endeavor. $29 million apiece, folks!
AND, even better, they'll give away spare space shuttle main engines (you haul, some assembly required).
There's a tantalizing reference to "potential artifacts that include the space shuttle, Hubble space telescope, Apollo, Mercury, and Gemini."
If anyone can wade through the goobledgook to find out how an institution (mine?) can grab a Hubble artifact, that would be swell.
Back in July, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took amazing photos of the landing sites of the Apollo missions. You could clearly see the footpaths made by the astronauts, and little bumps of the left-behind lower stage of the lunar module.
LRO has now taken much better photos of the Apollo 11 landing site. As usual, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy does a great job of explaining them. The big white blob is the lunar lander. The four dots around it are the landing legs. The dark streak above and to the left is made by human footprints -- space travelers.
Too cool: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged the Apollo moon landing sites. You can see the lunar module, its shadow, and the scientific instrument packages.
What really impresses me are the foot paths. See that smear? That's the path of Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell, when they walked on the moon. I wonder how long those paths will last.
My wife and I climbed a tallish building before Atlantis landed Sunday. Didn't see it, but we clearly heard the double sonic booms (a few seconds after NASA TV reported them heard at Edwards.) Exactly what it's supposed to sound like. So, in a small way, we welcomed the Hubble repair astronauts home. As, apparently, did pickuptrucks.com (stumbled across the link from Cars.com.) Everyone does love Hubble.
Also in the news, Prop 8 decision was announced Tuesday. Exactly what we all guessed based on the oral argument: Prop 8 stands, but my wife and I stay married, and laws that discriminate on sexual orientation are still subject to "heightened judicial scrutiny".
Afterward, as always, there was a rally. Small group (where the hell are you, pissed-off straight and gay people?), including many parents with kids (I was given a lovely kid-made sign, which made up for in sincerity what it lacked in legibility). Not sure how much the rally accomplished, but the wife said it was cathartic. We wrote letters to the editor this morning, too, not that people read newspapers anymore.
A snapshot of Drew Feustel (on the robotic arm) and John Grunsfeld (deep inside Hubble's guts). Thank you, Atlantis astronauts, for splendid work refurbishing Hubble, and for risking your lives to advance science.
Lots of space telescope news this week:
The Shuttle launched safely on Monday, captured the Hubble Space Telescope on Tuesday, and now astronauts are repairing Hubble. John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel have already removed WFPC2 and installed WFC3 - YAY! They are currently removing the faulty Data Handling Unit.
You can watch the repairs on NASA TV.
Also, Herschel and Planck launched successfully on Thurdsay morning. Herschel is an infrared/submillimeter space telescope, and Planck is a cosmic microwave background experiment.
Finally, No word yet on whether the Spitzer Space Telescope has run out of cryogenic coolant yet -- an event predicted for this week.. Thank, you Spitzer, for 5 years of wonderful science.
Servicing Mission 4 to repair the Hubble Space Telescope is due to launch Monday, May 11 at 2:01pm. The official estimate of the risk from space debris has been lowered to 1-in-221, but the shuttle will still fly tail-first to better shield the spacewalking astronauts, led by astronaut/astronomer John Grunsfeld.
Also, European space telescopes Herschel and Planck are set to launch on Thursday, 14 May from French Guiana. Planck is a Cosmic Microwave Background explorer (meaning it looks at the leftover light from the Big Bang), and Herschel is a far-infrared general-purpose telescope that looks mainly at baby stars in our galaxy, as well as galaxies that are rapidly forming stars.
Fingers crossed and atheist prayers delivered for two clean launches, good spacewalks, and a safe return for Atlantis.
Nature.com is reporting that debris from a recent satellite-satellite collision may prevent the upcoming (desperately needed) shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
"Kaputnik chaos could kill Hubble", from nature.com
"Satellite collision puts Hubble at risk", from abcnews.com
As you may have heard, a key control system on the Hubble Space Telescope failed Saturday. It may be possible, though laborious, to switch to a redundant backup that's been turned off for the past 18 years. However, switching to the backup means you don't have a backup anymore, and you know how NASA likes redundancy. As a result, NASA has delayed the Hubble repair mission from Oct 14 to mid-February 2009 at the earliest.
Some of that delay is for the engineers to figure out how to repair/replace the failed unit. (Apparently there's a spare in a closet.) Some of that delay is to train astronauts in the new repair (Go John Grunsfeld, go!) But most is because of two strange, crazy notions in which NASA, despite all the evidence, still believes. They are:
Astronauts are scheduled to visit the Hubble Space Telescope in October 2008 to perform "Servicing Mission 4" (SM4). They'll replace the gyroscopes and batteries, swap out the fine guidance sensor, install the WFC3 camera and the COS spectrograph, and try to fix the broken instruments ACS and STIS.
Since this is All-Star game week, let's rephrase in terms of baseball:
At the moment, Hubble is a pro baseball team whose two star pitchers (ACS and STIS) have been on the disabled list for years -- they may never play again. The Hubble All-Stars still shows up for games, but rely on just two aging nuckleball pitchers (WFPC2 and NICMOS). The team has announced a huge trade for two brilliant prospects, WFC3 and COS, who throw pitches nobody's ever seen. (WPC3 even pitches ambidexterously!*) At the same time, the team has scheduled risky surgeries to bring its two disabled pitchers, ACS and STIS, back to work.
So, Hubble fans around the world are waiting for the big trade (Servicing Mission 4), scheduled for October. If it happens, for the next several years the team will be the best in history. If it fails, the team will fall apart. Tense.
* ambidexterious: uses both UV/blue and IR/red detectors. Kinda like throwing with either arm.
Eighteen years ago yesterday, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on shuttle Discovery.
As other bloggers have noted, most freshman Astro101 students are the same age as Hubble. And were toddlers when astronauts corrected the spherical abberation, finally giving us diffraction--limited views of the distant universe.
A sailboat is "A hole in the water into which you throw buckets of money." If that's true, that the International Space Station must be "A hole in space into which we throw billions of dollars. Until we drop it into the water. Possibly on a sailboat." As you can tell, I'm critical of NASA's manned program; the Shuttle is dangerously outdated, and endlessly circling in low-earth orbit isn't exploring.
That said, I held my breath watching Endeavor launch today, carrying Barbara Morgan, one of the most tenacious people on Earth. (Or off it, temporarily.) Remember that Barbara was the backup for Christa McAuliffe on Challenger. After the disaster, NASA put the Teacher-in-Space Program (and Barbara) in limbo. She went back to teaching school in Idaho, continuing to pester NASA to let her fly, and giving talks about the space program in her spare time.
I attended one of these public lectures in the early 1990s, as a wee lass, and met Barbara after the talk. What I remember is my amazement at her determination -- that she believed she could make NASA let her fly.
In 1998, NASA accepted Ms. Morgan into the astronaut corps. (12 yrs after Challenger.)
In 2007, Barbara Morgan blasted into space onboard Shuttle Endeavor. That's 22 years after she was selected as the backup Teacher-in-Space. Twenty-two years!
Been traveling for much of the summer -- sorry for the paucity of posts. Conferences, talks, vacation.
Space news has been pretty quiet lately, though today we'll hear more about allegedly drunk astronauts. The Wif: "Hell, if I were a mission specialist, damn right I'd want to slug back a few shots before playing one-in-fifty Russian roulette. They're not driving, after all."
Me: "Um, but they need to be alert, in case there's a pre-launch evacuation down the zipline to the bunker. And if you were representing your country on world TV, mebbe you'd want to be sober."
When I was 12, I realized I'd never pass the physical to be a pilot astronaut, and started aiming to be a mission specialist. Since mission specialists come from a variety of specialties (science, medicine, engineering), I picked the one that excited me most -- astrophysics. After all, it worked for Sally Ride.
Quite a few years later, NASA's done zippo with crude spaceflight, and so here I am, letting photons do the traveling for me.
(More embarrassing NASA news over at Bad Astronomy.)
