+ 1 - 0 | §¶New Spaceflight Record (For A Little While, Anyway)
Per NASA: "Today Lopez-Alegria sets a U.S. record for a single flight of 196 days in space." His crewmate Suni Williams will break that record before her return to Earth, however.
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Per The Daily Mississippian: Two Ole Miss engineering majors will be spending their summer in Huntsville, Ala., interning at the Marshall Space Flight Center through NASA.
Sophomore mechanical engineering major Bob Aune and sophomore chemical engineering major Christin Burns are two out of four students from Mississippi that will be part of the program this summer.
Burns interned for NASA last summer, working on a project that involved testing adhesives used to repair tiles on a space shuttle while in orbit.
I have no idea whether the Russian Space Agency, Roskosmos, has an official motto or not, but, if it were needing one, it could certainly do worse than Jerry Maguire's "Show me the money."
Every year, there are multiple announcements from RSA saying, "Oh, we could totally do _________," with a caveat that they're just waiting for someone to pay for it. They could build a new, larger spacecraft, if ESA or someone would partner with them. They could fly more Soyuz capsules to ISS, if someone were willing to pay for them. Etc.
One of the more interesting ones a while back was that they could send Soyuz vehicles on circumlunar flights. If, naturally, tourists wanted to pay for the trip. An interesting idea, but I haven't heard anything else come of it.
Per Space.com: A privately-built rocket blasted off from New Mexico's Spaceport America Saturday, roaring skyward to the edge of space carrying a variety of payloads - including the ashes of Star Trek's "Scotty" James Doohan and NASA Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper.
A SpaceLoft XL rocket shot upwards on a suborbital trajectory, launched by UP Aerospace, a Connecticut-based company. The mission - labeled SL-2 - was loaded with an array of educational investigations, as well as commercial and entrepreneurial payloads.
Per the European Space Agency: If you think you can come up with the ideal playlist for astronauts flying around the Earth in the International Space Station , ESA wants to hear from you.
...
ESA is launching a competition to find a set of 10 tunes that is out of this world. All you have to do is write down a song selection that you think would be most suitable for the astronauts on the ISS to listen to. Before you decide, try to put yourself in the shoes of the men and women who live on the Station and put together a playlist that would cheer them up, inspire them, etc….
...
The winner’s playlist will be downloaded onto an iPod and sent to the ISS in ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), which will be making its maiden flight later this year. The 20 tonne craft, named ‘Jules Verne’, after the famous French science fiction writer, will be delivering about seven tonnes of cargo to the astronauts living in the International Space Station.
The bad news, though: "Entries are only accepted from nationals of the following countries which are participating in the ATV programme: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland."
I've been playing some more with the possible redesign of ATW, which, at the moment, I'm really inclined to implement. I haven't made many purely aesthetic changes since I last wrote about it, though I've made a few minor aeshetic/functionality tweaks that you may or may not notice. I've also played with the Tags feature (which show up on the old-school ATW as keywords, without the cool things they do in the Sandbox), and have improved, among other things, the search feature.
Partially in response to the criticism that fewer items are visible at a time in the redesign, I've also created an ATW Headlines version of the blog, where you can rapidly scroll through the brief descriptions of the entries.
Like I said, I'm planning now to switch to the redesign version of ATW when I'm finally happy with it (It's now the version of the blog I use most of the time). In the meantime, I'd really appreciate any feedback. If there are things you like about the current design that changed in the redesign, let me know, and it may be possible to combine elements between the two.
Also, the Sandbox version is still only the full version of the blog, but, for readers of the Space blog, if I redesign the full blog, I'll probably redesign the Space version in a similar manner. (Based on some ideas I have for the third ATW blog, though, I may start playing with individual distinctive looks for the different versions, but that's further down the road.)
I know you're rightfully proud of creating a robot duplicate of yourself, that looks and moves exactly like you. It's quite a scientific accomplishment.
But remember: Creating humaniform androids may seem like all fun and games, until someone starts the robot holocaust.
OK, yeah, I'm enough of a SciFi geek that the idea of a Class M planet (or "Minshara Class") resonates with me: "They are always located in the ecological region of a star where they are provided enough warmth and energy to develop and sustain carbon-based life," says Wikipedia. "Their surfaces comprises a thin tectonic layer floating on a molten rock mantle and they usually have many active volcanoes. Most importantly, they have plenty of liquid water necessary for life to exist. Their atmospheres contain oxygen and nitrogen with other trace gases."
In other words, planets kind of like ours.
It's too soon to say for sure that Gliese 581 c is a Class M planet, but, for the first time, astronomers have found an extrasolar world they believe could very possibly fit the classificiation.
The planet is in the Goldilocks Zone for liquid water around a red dwarf, not that far away -- a mere 20.5 lightyears.
Life on Gliese 581 c would be a bit different -- while the planet's circumfrence is only half again that of Earth, it's density is such that humans would have to adjust to a constant 5-g's; and a year there lasts only 13 days.
Although astronomers believe water could exist on the planet, they have no idea yet whether it actually does or not. And, even if it does, habitability could be limited. Some astronomers believe that, because of its proximity to its star, Gliese 581 c may be gravitationally locked to its star as the moon is to the Earth, so that one side is always facing it, creating a huge variation in heat from one side to the other. (The article doesn't say this, but it would seem, depending on what effect that had on an atmosphere, there would still be the possibility of a temperate zone at the terminator.)
Regardless of what the exact conditions on Gliese 581 c may be, the important thing is this -- these worlds do exist. It's just a matter of finding them.
Per Information Week: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the latest federal agency to put a hold on PC upgrades to Windows Vista. NASA has decided against deploying Microsoft's five-month-old operating system anytime this year.
The decision puts NASA in company with the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation, both of which in February revealed temporary bans on Vista.
...
In a meeting with IT professionals and user-group representatives last week on Microsoft's campus, CEO Steve Ballmer rejected an assertion by a NASA computer scientist that Vista has been banned by most sectors of the federal government.
"Vista has been anything but banned from most parts of the U.S. federal government," Ballmer said, adding that he anticipated near-term adoption in "a number" of government accounts. He stopped short, however, of naming any government agencies that are in the process of deploying Vista or about to do so.
In the meantime, though, I thought I'd pass along this recent review of the book, which does a pretty fair job of describing what's in the book, even if it fails to really capture what makes this book special.
New wide-angle panorama of the Carina Nebula, one of the largest Hubble panoramas ever. NASA et al, via Cosmic Log.
On this date in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched aboard the STS-31 mission of Space Shuttle Discovery. The telescope was deployed the next day. Problems with its mirror would be corrected more than three years later on the STS-61 mission. Preparations are currently underway for a final Hubble servicing mission in September 2008.
Also on this date, in 1962, a television picture was transmitted through space for the first time via the Echo 1 satellite, and, in 1967, Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die during an orbital spaceflight when the parachute during the reentry of his Soyuz 1 capsule.
And, if for some reason, you don't have a pair of 3-D glasses handy, there are some good 2-D pics there as well.
Per NASA: STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), ... launched October 2006, will provide a unique and revolutionary view of the Sun-Earth System. The two nearly identical observatories - one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind - will ... will reveal the 3D structure of coronal mass ejections; violent eruptions of matter from the sun that can disrupt satellites and power grids, and help us understand why they happen. STEREO will become a key addition to the fleet of space weather detection satellites by providing more accurate alerts for the arrival time of Earth-directed solar ejections with its unique side-viewing perspective.
Several people from ATW-fave fields are included in the list, including U2 frontman Bono, iCEO Steve Jobs, Apple Chief Designer Jonathan Ive, Wikipedia founder (and Huntsville native) Jimmy Wales, noted Frank Miller parodyist Frank Miller, Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson and astrophyscist Neil Degrasse Tyson (and possibly some others, the interface was annoying, so I may have missed someone).
I don't usually post about other things I'm working on here, but we recently had a project go online at work that I'm rather pleased with.
As part of our team's support for the upcoming STS-118 flight of Educator Astronaut Barbara Morgan, our other writer and I traveled out to Johnson Space Center a while back to conduct interviews with a small handful of the many, many people on the ground that are involved in making the STS-118 mission happen.
The series of features tells the story of the STS-118 mission in a way that you would not normally hear it, and showcases for students and teachers some of the wide variety of jobs that make up the NASA workforce.
The people we talked to were really fascinating, and had some interesting stories.
Yeah, it had its flaws, but it had good heart, and I liked its accessible space-positive attitude. Given its disappointing theatrical run, I was all for it having a decent second life on DVD.
But $28 bucks for a version with no special features besides the trailer? Nah, I'll pass.
This was a movie that cried out for some good extras, like what went into making its well-researched Mercury-Atlas recreation. I'm sure there would have been some AltSpace types that would have been glad to talk about the real-world private rocket builders. But, alas, it's apparently not to be.
I've been doing this whole blog thing for a while now, and consider myself fairly blog-savvy, but every once and a while I come across something I'm just completely clueless about.
For example, until today, I was completely oblivious to the idea of "blog carnivals."
As I understand it, a blog carnival is a sort of regular round-up of related posts on a variety of blogs. I was introduced to the concept by the Why Homeschool blog, which is working to set up a Carnival of Space.
Again, this is just my undestanding, but apparently the CoS will be a place where multiple blogs can submit space-themed posts into a weekly digest. Readers can then go to the Carnival and skim though space content from multiple blogs in one place.
So for any other space bloggers out there, go check it out, and for ATW readers, it's sounds like it'll be a great tool for reading a variety of good space content.
I'll almost certainly be submitting stuff before long, but a) I want to see an edition or two (the first one hits April 26) to make sure I've got the idea right, and b) I'll have to write something worth sharing.
I've been meaning to post this for a while, but had to wait until I could find it online.
When I started reading this article, it sounded like the most exciting scientific development I'd come across in quite a while. Further into it, it more or less specifically says that it doesn't mean the cool things I thought it did in the beginning, but, even so.
Basically, some researchers have found a way to store human memories to computer chips. Plug the chip into your brain, and if functions like a second hard drive supporting the old biochemical method.
The obvious benefit is that said method would be immune to the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Fear Alzheimer's is setting in? Just upgrade your old storage to the latest hardware.
But -- while the article says this isn't feasible, one can't help but suspect that, if this were to be widely adopted, it would open the door for unbelievable breakthroughs.
The biochemical processes that allow us to store and recover information are pretty opaque to science at the moment; at least in terms of decoding how the information is written.
But electronic data storage? Yeah, that's a whole lot more mature.
Granted, the brain wouldn't write to the chip using the same protocols as a computer, and, as the article points out, its protocols are going to be far more difficult to figure out.
Ultimately, however, it is just an electronic data storage protocol, and I have a hard time believing that the incredible wealth avaliable to anyone who figures out how to crack the code won't provide enough incentive for someone to do it. Maybe not immediately, but eventually and inevitably.
Figure out how to write specific memories to the chip, and how to copy that data, and bingo -- We can remember it for you wholesale.
Figure out how to write data onto the chip, and with a quick download, you can know kung fu.
The first 3-man crew arrived a few days later after being launched by the workhorse Soyuz booster (shown below). But, something stuck and they couldn't get it, requiring them to return to Earth. The second crew, with tools to open th Salyut, did enter and stayed for 16 days. But, tragically, upon return, a leak in their spacecraft sucked out all oxygen, so that they died enroute.
The Russians were developing another spacecraft to be used for military observations. This Almaz series was a response to the U.S. Air Force's plans for manned observatories. The first Almaz was "disguised" as Salyut-2 to prevent other nations from awareness of the "spy" effort. This Salyut-2 was launched on April 3, 1973 but was never visited because a fire broke out onboard, so damaging the ship that it was uninhabitable and was decelerated into the atmosphere on May 28, 1973.
Because of these problems, when a space station was finally manned by multiple crews in 1973, it was not a Soviet facility, but rather the American Skylab.
OK, I've managed to avoid playing with my blog template for quite a while now, particularly when it comes to making layout changes.
But... I've been helping someone with some design work for another site (well, really just coding work -- he's making the design decisions, I'm just helping to implement them), and there have been some things to come out of that work that I've really liked, and it made me wonder what ATW would be like if I made some changes.
Anyway, I've started drafting a new design for ATW, and I'd appreciate any feedback on it. It still needs some tweaking, but I've reached the point with it where there's no point putting a lot more time into it just to throw it away. (If you're reading this on the space blog, you'll note that the redesign shows the full blog, but, if I end up making a change, I have the option of using the same design for the space blog, or not, if that's what people think.)
I would appreciate any comments, but for those who aren't the type to actually post comments, I have a handy one-click feedback poll here:
From Spaceflight Now: NASA managers are reassessing whether to leave astronaut Sunita Williams aboard the international space station until August, a longer-than-planned stay because of a shuttle launch delay, or to bring her home aboard the Atlantis when flights resume in June, sources say.
Williams was launched to the station aboard the shuttle Discovery in December. She originally planned to return to Earth aboard the shuttle Endeavour in June, after the flight of Atlantis in March. But Atlantis was grounded by hail damage to the ship's external tank and the March launch has been delayed to no earlier than June 8. As a result, Endeavour's launch has slipped to Aug. 9 and along with it, Williams' ride home.
Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's chief of spaceflight operations, said during a news conference April 10 that barring major problems, Williams would come home in August aboard Endeavour as planned. He said the impact of additional exposure to space radiation was minimal.
Sources, however, now say NASA is revisiting the issue but a timetable for making a final decision was not known.
For her part, Williams said during an earlier interview she was not overly concerned about increased exposure to space radiation or any other aspects of a longer-than-planned stay in space.
I've updated the left-hand sidebar with the latest changes to the space shuttle launch schedule. STS-117, currently scheduled for June 8, remains the same; STS-118 moves back four days to August 9; and the next four flights get new working target dates.
I've not heard anything about how this affects the schedule after STS-124, but since the next mission, STS-119, was not scheduled until July 2008 anyway, the slip from February to April on STS-124 could theoretically still allow for making the July date for 119 and picking up the previous schedule from there. But, of course, I'll update as new announcements are made.
If you have one in your area, you can celebrate the occassion at a Yuri's Night party (and, if you don't, you can go online for the Second Life party). I'll be missing out, I'm afraid -- despite the fact that Huntsville is listed as a party site, I've seen no information about an event, and the organizer didn't respond to e-mail. And I'm not doing the Second Life thing. I can barely handle the one.
OK, this week, not only do we have the regularly scheduled new Hatbag strip, we also have bonus strips! Not one, not two, but -- oh, wait, no, two. Anyway, enjoy.
We're still trying to make some progress in the top comic list polls again, so please feel more then free to vote Hatbag.
And, since apparently a bunch of ATW readers don't follow the weekly Hatbag link, I thought a brief explanation might be in order -- Hatbag is a weekly webcomic Lain and I create; following two old college buddies as they adjust to sort-of grown-up life. If you read ATW, take a few extra seconds to go read Hatbag. Please? Please?
I have no idea whether the Russian Space Agency, Roskosmos, has an official motto or not, but, if it were needing one, it could certainly do worse than Jerry Maguire's "Show me the money."
I've been playing some more with the 
An open letter to Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro:
OK, yeah, I'm enough of a SciFi geek that the idea of a 
Shamefully, I'm still very gradually working through 
Grab your red-and-blue 3-D glasses, and get ready to see the sun as you've never seen it before.
Time is working on its annual 
I don't usually post about other things I'm working on here, but we recently had a project go online at work that I'm rather pleased with.
I wanted to buy 
I've been doing this whole blog thing for a while now, and consider myself fairly blog-savvy, but every once and a while I come across something I'm just completely clueless about.
I've been meaning to post this for a while, but had to wait until I could find it online.
On this date in 1971, the Soviet Union launched its first space station, Salyut 1.
I've updated the left-hand sidebar with the latest 
13 April 1970: 
No blogging today; I'm at the 
OK, this week, not only do we have the regularly scheduled 
So