According to an article in the NY Times , preliminary tests on the sample capsule currently being carefully opened have shown “no signs” of asteroid samples. It’s not looking good. “Preliminary tests on a capsule retrieved from the probe have shown no signs of the precious samples of the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid that the Hayabusa was supposed to retrieve – samples that scientists around the globe had hoped would hold new clues about the formation of the solar system,” says the Times . But JAXA, Japan’s space agency, hasn’t given up all hope of finding trace elements of Itokawa, the third-of-a-mile long, potato-shaped asteroid it landed on in 2003.
Space Shuttle Columbia Launches on STS-1 April 12, 1981, the Space Shuttle Program lifts off. It will wind down this year. NASA Choking back a tear, NASA has announced the dates of the final missions to be made by the Space Shuttle. Discovery will lift off on November 1, for a 10-day mission carrying parts to the International Space Station
Six weeks, and over 100 hours of footage shot on several Canon EOS 5D Mark IIs culminates in this remarkable, 4-minute time lapse of a Space Shuttle launch. [ Air&Space via Planet5D ] More »
The Voyager 2 transmission hiccup appears to have been identified. The problem? “A value in a single memory location was changed from a 0 to a 1,” said JPL’s Veronia McGregor.
Credit cards are great to pay for shiny things and get further in debt. But you can also make their concierge services to obey your every desire, from finding an out-of-stock gadget to a bathtub full of cheese. Here’s how.
How’s this for a crazy astral event: an absolutely gigantic star about 90 times the size of our sun has been shot out of its birthplace and is currently rocketing across space at 250,000 miles per hour. Hot damn! More »
Del Mar, Calif.-based Vivos has a plan for anyone fearing doomsday: buy space in a bunker underneath the Mojave Desert. Just in case, of course. The company promises that for $50,000, buyers can get a four-person room in a nuke-proof bunker that features an atrium, a gym, and a jail, plus an on-site restaurant, as the Associated Press reports.
NASA and ESA are planning to launch three spacecraft into orbit around the sun some three million miles apart, and then have them shoot lasers at each other, Popular Science reports. You may want to stop for a moment and just bask in the coolness of that idea. Back yet?
Yang Liwei Head of Shenzhou 5, China’s first manned spaceflight Controversy ensues According to the newly published autobiography of Yang Liwei, head of China’s first manned space mission in 2003, the crew’s meals included dog meat from Huajiang county, which is renowned for its health benefits. The meat is claimed to “cure high blood pressure, help build up old people’s health, and reduce frequent urination,” handy on a long voyage. In contrast, according to a Reuters article from last year, American space food runs to chicken with rice and macaroni and cheese, and Russians go for canned fish and borscht. The Japanese, of course, eat sushi .
Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong, forever immortalized as the first man to set foot on the moon, has taken issue with President Obama’s outline for the future of NASA and America’s future participation in space. Obama’s plan calls for scrapping the Constellation program — which would have replaced the country’s retiring shuttle fleet with rockets to ferry cargo and personnel — shifting focus from the moon to Mars , and concentrating on next-gen technology rather than having NASA repurpose the equipment it’s used for decades. Speaking to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on Wednesday, Armstrong said: “I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement.” He continued with, “A plan that was invisible to so many was likely contrived by a very small group in secret who persuaded the president that this was a unique opportunity to put his stamp on a new and innovative program. I believe the President was poorly advised.” The Constellation program has been widely criticized for being behind schedule and over budget.
Twitter has gone from all over the world to out of the world and it’s all happening so soon that we’re all clueless about it. The University of Tokyo has introduced a bot that tweets the real-time state of a satellite. @XI-V. It records and tweets the battery voltage, temperature and location of the satellite as it makes itself comfortable over a planet
The apple tree that thumped Sir Isaac Newton on his genius little head and kicked off his theory of gravitation is finally getting its due, as a piece of it is going to enjoy a free ride up to orbit . It even gets to bring a picture of ol’ Isaac with it! The Royal Society in London is supplying the four-inch-long chunk and picture to British astronaut Piers Sellers, who is scheduled to head up to the International Space Station on May 14th aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis . The gift of astro-wood will also commemorate 350th anniversary of the society. “We’re delighted to take this piece of Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree to orbit.
NASA engineers have a hit a new level with testing for the Orion crew capsule, and have successfully catapulted it about a mile into the air Thursday at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the Associated Press reports. The idea was to test a launch-abort system, in development for four years, that could return astronauts and the capsule itself to safety in the event of a launch pad fire or other problem during the craft’s launch sequence. The report said the test “marked the first time a launch-abort system of this type has been used for a U.S. space travel system since the Apollo rockets of the 1960s and 1970s.” NASA originally planned the Orion capsule as a way to take astronauts back to the moon , but the Obama administration has redirected resources toward building more advanced rockets.
Gene Roddenberry wasn’t a scientist, but he saw the future. From teleportation to tablets to warp drives , Star Trek inspired kids worldwide to invent amazing technologies. One of those kids was Dr. Marc Rayman, Chief Propulsion Engineer at NASA’s JPL
Following the trail of SpaceShipTwo , Dassault has been working on a new suborbital civilian spacecraft. Not to be confused with the Future High-Altitude High-Speed Transport 20XX , the new aircraft could be a 11-ton vehicle derived from their VEHRA satellite launcher. More » Business – Aerospace and Defense – Aeronautical – Virgin Galactic – Aircraft and Components
