A collection of photos taken from space of cities at night. Beautiful. (via ben fry)
The Expedition One crew, consisting of one American and two Russian astronauts, spent 136 days in space aboard the International Space Station. Their logs include a record of the movies they watched while on their mission.
6 Feb 2001: We ate some dinner and watched the last part of "City of Angels". Shep did his best to explain to Yuri and Sergei what the phrase "chick flick" means.
24 Feb 2001 We put some chow and the DVD player in the Soyuz and close the hatch about 0530. It takes 2 orbits to get the first set of hooks off and the docking tunnel pressure checked. We get the "Austin Powers" sequel in while all this is taking place. (Maybe a Soyuz first here).
Update: The Expedition One crew also documented their many computer problems.
Sergei notices that the Russian PCS laptop has locked up. He tries to reboot, but the Sun application software won't load. Lots of messages on the screen noting data errors. Sergei thinks that it may be the hard drive. He boots up windows to see if the windows partition runs OK--it does. So at least some of the hardware is functional.
Maybe they need Macs?
Great set of photographs showing how the Space Shuttle gets ready for takeoff, from the Vehicle Assembly Building all the way to the launch pad.
Budget cuts at NASA means that one of the two Mars rovers will be shut down, even though it's still doing useful science.
Besides resting Spirit, scientists also likely will have to reduce exploration by Opportunity, which is probing a large crater near the equator. Instead of sending up commands to Opportunity every day to drive or explore a rock, its activities may be limited to every other day, said John Callas, the Mars Exploration Rover project manager at JPL.
The rovers were originally deployed for three-month missions but have operated for more than four years.
Update: NASA decided not to go through with Mars rover budget cuts. (thx, jeff)
A fantastic pair of maps, courtesy of Strange Maps:
- A map of the area covered by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their Apollo 11 moon walks, superimposed on a soccer pitch for comparison purposes.
- The same map, superimposed on a baseball diamond.
Update: Here's a look at the traverse map overlaid on the moon's surface.
Update: For all you conspiracy theorists out there, LVHRD superimposed the traverse map onto a Universal Studios soundstage.
On an upcoming servicing mission scheduled for August 2008, NASA plans to upgrade the Hubble telescope to be 90 times as powerful as it currently is. 90 times!
Two powerful new instruments will be installed on the mission. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) will allow Hubble to see fainter and more distant galaxies than anything it has seen before, shedding light on the early universe. This could allow Hubble to see galaxies so far away that we see them as they were just 400 million years after the big bang.
William Safire, who now does the On Language column for the NY Times, wrote a speech for President Nixon in 1969 in the event that something happened during the Apollo 11 mission to strand the astronauts on the moon.
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
(via cyn-c)
NASA and researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a robotic camera mount that enables ordinary digital cameras to take gigapixel panoramic images (like these).
Trailer for In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary that "brings together for the first, and possibly the last, time surviving crew members from every single Apollo mission that flew to the Moon along with visually stunning archival material re-mastered from the original NASA film footage". BOY HOWDY! Here's a review of the film from Ad/Astra, the magazine of the National Space Society.
High silica content of Martian soil is yet another indicator of past water on Mars. "The fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable."
A nice piece about the tools that astronauts use in space. "[The space station arm] can delicately move suited astronauts, plucking them up from the airlock and transferring them to designated work areas and back again, like a mother cat relocating kittens."
Using ground penetrating radar, NASA has discovered an ice deposit at Mars' south pole so large that if melted, it would cover the entire planet under 30 feet of water.
NASA's plan for dealing with a psychotic or suicidal astronaut in space: duct tape and tranquilizers.
Quicktime VR panoramas from the Apollo missions to the moon (with audio). These are fantastic.
Photographs taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor suggest that liquid water may still run on Mars. Successive photos of crater gullies show activity in the last 4 years.
Woo, NASA finally decides to fix the Hubble, repairs that will keep it working until at least 2013. "Scientists expect an upgraded Hubble to continue to make groundbreaking discoveries."
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently snapped a picture of the Opportunity rover perched on the rim of Victoria Crater. Opportunity drove more than 5 miles from its landing site to get there. High resolution photo here. Here's where Opportunity is located on Mars.
Space tourist Anousheh Ansari is Flickring photos from the International Space Station. NASA reportedly spent 250,000 man-hours building a module to upload snapshots from space via the Flickr API.
Update: That NASA man-hours stat is a joke, sorry. NASA is not that absurdly wasteful. I have no idea how she's getting the photos on Flickr. Do they have web access on the ISS?
Update: Ansari called Larry Page today and reported that there's no internet access on the ISS. Email is delivered in batches...so she's either emailing them to Flickr or someone's uploading them for her. BTW, the first kottke.org reader in space...could you give me a call when you get there? (thx, terrell)
Update: According to Ansari's blog (from space!), email is sent from the ISS three times per day.
Yesterday, almost 30 years after it was launched, the Voyager spacecraft crossed the 100 AU boundry, meaning it is 100 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is. The article is worth a read. (via sb)
Stardust Holiday is a blog written by a woman who's spending three months in bed as part of a NASA study. (via cyn-c)
Google and NASA have announced plans to collaborate on projects like "large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry". In 6 months, Yahoo will announce a collaboration with the Russian Space Agency to launch original content into space. Microsoft will announce in a year that they've had space travel capabilities built into Office for years now but no one uses it...in two years time, they'll completely reorg around manned missions to Mars.
Is PowerPoint responsible for the woes of the Space Shuttle? Well, no, but it's not helping any. "The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America -- the PowerPointing of the planet, actually -- is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese."
Space Shuttle Discovery lands safely, thank goodness.
Fantastic must-read article slamming NASA with regard to the Space Shuttle program. I've been following Maciej's del.icio.us links about the Shuttle for weeks now and was wondering if he'd get around to writing it up. Worth the wait.
The Space Shuttle is set to return to space today. Looks like you can watch a live video stream of the launch onthe web.
Explanation of NASA's launch countdown. T-20 minutes doesn't necessarily mean there's 20 minutes until launch.
