Welcome to California Atlantis!

May 24, 2009

After traveling around the Earth for 13 days, notching up 5.3 million miles, I'm sure the seven crew of Atlantis were a little frustrated at having to postpone their return to Florida due to bad weather. But Florida's loss is California's gain when mission control decided use the back-up option of landing at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.

For more on the STS-125 Hubble servicing mission check out Shuttle Crew Over the Moon at Hubble Success.

I thought we'd seen the last shuttle landing at Edwards when Discovery used the base as a backup landing strip late last year after the space station STS-126 mission, so this is a bonus.

Edwards is only two hours north from where I live, so I'm feeling itchy I should have made the effort to welcome in Atlantis this morning. Looking out the window, the shuttle will be enjoying some classic SoCal sunshine right about now.

But you know what this means don't you? We get to see some more 747-Shuttle piggyback action when NASA authorizes the mother of all cross-country taxi services! I thought we'd seen the last of that too.

Welcome to California Atlantis, we're very excited to have you visit!

Update (10:45am PST):

The STS-125 astronauts are walking around and beneath space shuttle Atlantis, taking a last look at the vehicle that served them well in orbit and brought them safely home to Edwards Air Force Base in California this morning. --NASA archives

Source: NASA

Houston, This Is Proving To Be Very Popular: The Rise of the Twitternaut

May 22, 2009

In today's ultra-fast world of microblogging (i.e. Twitter), the more followers you have, the better. Well, that's what Ashton Kutcher would have you believe anyway (nearly 2 million followers? Isn't that known as 'stamp collecting'?).

Personally, I'm a strong believer in online communities, so rather than quantity, it's more about quality. In short, I'd much rather have a community on Twitter I can have a two-way conversation with, rather than the population of a small country vying for my attention 24/7.

Collecting followers on Twitter has become a hobby for celebrities... but why do people want to follow them? It seems to have little to do with their personalities, and it has even less to do with the quality of their tweets (believe me, I tried following a few, but quickly tired of "this is what I'm eating" photos and profound quotes from lifestyle gurus).

However, should a person do something important, I might be inclined to follow them on Twitter so I can read about their experiences, whether they are deemed famous or not.

So, when an astronaut decides he's going to tweet from space, while carrying out a historically significant, brave and outright awesome mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope, you might find me following said astronaut.

Michael Massimino (a.k.a. @Astro_Mike) took the opportunity of being the first human to ever tweet from space. At the moment, I don't think we can fully evaluate what this means, as Twitter could just as quickly disappear as it appeared (after all, Web 2.0 moves fast... who's to say Web 3.0 will include Twitter anyway?), it may just be a short-term trend. Still, Massimino was the first man to tweet from space, and that is Internet history.

But this goes way beyond the Internet, @Astro_Mike is providing the world with an intimate view of what it's like to be an astronaut orbiting the Earth. And he's doing it in 140 characters or less.

"As I closed my eyes to sleep last night I thought, 'These eyes have seen some beautiful sights today.'" - @Astro_Mike

His tweets range from the routine, to the inspiring, to the incredible, to the personal; but all of them provide an important viewpoint from life in space. What's more, @Astro_Mike has gathered quite a following. Before the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, Massimino had 100,000 people looking out for his tweets, today he has well over 300,000.

At a time when NASA's outstanding endeavours need to be shouted from the rooftops, we have an astronaut, in orbit, telling a global online community exactly what it's like to live in space. And he's proving to be rather popular. I think we can expect many more astronaut Twitter accounts in the future, which is no bad thing...

Now for the Final Spacewalk of STS-125, the Final Hubble Mission

May 18, 2009

Sunday saw one of the hardest ever spacewalks carried out by Michael Massimino and Michael Good, eventually notching up a total of 8 hours, 2 minutes (the sixth longest in history). The two astronauts of the STS-125 Hubble servicing mission went 90 minutes over-schedule after several problems including a drained power tool battery and a sticky bolt.

Down here on Earth, if your drill battery runs low on power, you simply plug it in and charge it back up. If a bolt on your fence refuses to budge, you get your hammer out and give it a smack. Unfortunately, when you're 300 miles above the Earth, in a vacuum, travelling at a speed of a little under 5 miles per second (for perspective, if an airliner could travel from Los Angeles to New York at that speed, it would only take 8.2 minutes!), it's not that easy.

Painstakingly, the astronauts had to unscrew 111 tiny screws from a cover plate attached to the outside of Hubble. Under the cover plate was the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) that needed some repair work, but a hand rail was blocking their access to the plate. When Massimino and Good tried to remove the hand rail, a bolt became stuck. So what was the solution? Using brute force, the astronauts ripped the hand rail off.

See some of the tools used to fix Hubble in the Discovery Tech Wide Angle gallery, "Extreme Tools to Fix the Hubble Space Telescope"

Interestingly, as any loose debris can be a serious risk in orbit, the spacewalkers taped down any loose bits on the hand rail before they broke it off.

Although the rail had been torn free, the space drill failed as it ran out of power, so it took some time to return it to Space Shuttle Atlantis so it could be replaced with a fully-charged battery. But sure enough, the astronauts completed their task, finishing the fourth spacewalk of the final Hubble servicing mission.

Today marks the final spacewalk ever to be carried out on Hubble. Assuming all goes according to plan, the orbiting telescope will undock from Atlantis on Tuesday. After this extraordinary repair mission we'll hopefully see another five years of Hubble action, helping us see further and clearer across the Universe than ever before.

To watch the fifth and final spacewalk, check out NASA TV at 9:16AM (EDT). Full STS-125 scheduling.

Fellow Discovery Blogger Ray Villard is currently on the ground at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, watching all the events unfold. Find out more about STS-125 mission progress and why it might not only be us humans keeping a watchful eye on Atlantis...

Sources: BBC, NASA, Florida Today

Galaxies Crash, Dino-Killing Asteroid, Twin Space Shuttles (Video)

April 27, 2009

Up to bat for this week's Discovery Space Wrap Up: Four-way galaxy cluster crash spied by Hubble and Chandra telescopes, Asteroid collision predates dinosaur extinction by 300,000 years, The last time you'll see two space shuttles out at NASA launch pads -- ever:

Mars 500, Hubble's Winning Image, Yuri's Night Craziness (Video)

April 06, 2009

In this week's Discovery Space Wrap Up:
Mars500 trial run begins (aka 6 guys stuck in a tube for 105 days), Hubble Space Telescope's winning image of Arp 274 taken, and last but not least some crazy fun Yuri's Night parties:

Firefox Logo Captured by Hubble?

March 26, 2009

I couldn't resist posting about this, even though I'm about a year behind the curve.

For one, I love Firefox too much. Two, supernova remnants are awesome:

Courtesy of TechFresh.net. That's V838 Monocerotis, by the way. On the left. Duh.

Oh, and speaking of supernovae get a load of Discover Magazine's star formation game. Amazing and ridiculously addictive.

My best score is 1128... $10 says you can beat it!

Photo: TechFresh.net

Saturn Moon Parade, Gravity Mapper Launches, Space Station (Video)

March 23, 2009

In this week's Discovery Space Wrap Up: The Hubble Space Telescope captures a moon parade around Saturn, GOCE the gravity mapping satellite launches, the International Space Station gets its wings.

Satellite Crash, Europa Moon Mission, Hubble Mission in Danger?

February 19, 2009

Please don't hesitate to chastise me for how late this is:

Also: I wanted to mention another bit of news in the video, but I had already made a YouTube clip for it. Check this out:

How Superman Sees Outer Space

February 10, 2009

Imagine you're Superman, and you're sick and tired of saving the people of Earth. They take your super-awesomeness for granted, so your home planet Krypton is looking pretty good.

"Forget this," you say. "Peace out!"

Trouble is, Krypton is 50 light-years away (yes, I looked it up). What are you going to do with all of that time, even assuming you can travel twice the speed of light, let alone the standard speed of light (670,616,629 mph, mind you).

Duuuuh: Function as a super-human space observatory and solve the mysteries of the universe!

Here's one thing you might see during your superluminal journey:

One down, about 199,999,999,999 to go!

Science De-Stimulated(?), Amazing Spiral Galaxy, Hot 'n Rocky Exoplanet

February 09, 2009

Without any adieu, the space video for this week:

Also: If you haven't checked out this week's big Wide Angle: Mission to Europa?, click here to dig in!