Science for people who never knew it could be interesting
February 12th, 2010
Right now, astronauts are busy adding some new features to the International Space Station — another connecting node (which will also house some life support equipment), and the cupola (an observation post, essentially a big “picture window”). Built by ESA, they are the last major pieces to be added to the non-Russian side of the station. This bit of ESA video fills you in on these two modules, and how they’ll be installed and used:
February 10th, 2010
The past week’s assortment of (mostly) science-related blog carnival posts:
All Things Eco Blog Carnival Volume Eighty Eight
Carnival of Mathematics #62 — The Endeavour
February 8th, 2010
At the Deutsches Museum Flugwerft Schleissheim north of Munich, a line-up of ejection seats from both sides of the cold war:
From the left:
February 5th, 2010
Well, so the future of the U.S. manned space program is up in the air right now — one thing’s for sure, though. The future’s going to need a lot more robots. NASA and GM recently released some video on Robonaut 2, the latest fruit of a collaborative effort to create a telerobotic helper for astronauts:
The idea is that Robonaut could remain on the outside of the ISS, while being operated by astronauts remaining inside the station. This would save a lot of setup / cleanup time, as well as reducing the astronauts’ exposure to a variety of hazards outside the station. To give you an idea of how quickly this effort has advanced, here’s a video from a few years back about the original Robonaut:
February 3rd, 2010
It’s early in the month, so there’s a bounty crop of (mostly) science-related blog carnivals for you to choose from this week:
All Things Eco Blog Carnival Volume Eighty Seven
Festival of the Trees 44: A stroll with a treeblogger
Four Stone Hearth #85: Cold Wind Edition
Grand Rounds Vol 6, No. 19 — How Much Grand Could a Grand Rounds Grind?
February 1st, 2010
These are interesting times for NASA’s crewed spaceflight program.
Let’s start with the calendar. Today’s the seventh anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia during re-entry. Last Thursday, January 28th, was the anniversary of the 1986 loss of the space shuttle Challenger in a launch explosion. And the 27th was the anniversary of the 1967 Apollo 1 on-pad fire that killed its astronauts during a pre-launch test. This picture is of the base of the launch pad (pad 34) that was the site of the Apollo 1 fire.
So it’s more than a bit ironic that the U.S. crewed space program may get closed out (or at least, radically reshaped) today — by a turn of events far more prosaic than a catastrophic accident. Stay tuned…
January 29th, 2010
OK, so at this point we have no idea where astronauts will go next, if anywhere. But in the meantime, armchair astronauts can (to some degree) content themselves with a couple of cool videos put together by Doug Ellison of UnmannedSpaceflight.com from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) data.
One of the products that comes from the MRO HiRISE camera team is a set of digital elevation models (DEMs), essentially high-resolution data sets showing the elevation of swaths of terrain — each about 4 km wide and 8-12 km long. Using these, Doug (or anybody else, for that matter, with some know-how and computer time) could put together video showing what a flyover of the imaged terrain would look like — in a realistic fashion, without exaggeration of elevations (although the color looks flat to me).
The first flyover is of the wall of Mojave crater:
The second is of Athabasca Valles, a channel cut by catastrophic flooding:
Doug says he’s hard at work on more of these flyover videos, so stay tuned…
January 27th, 2010
The past week’s selection of science-related blog carnivals (short, but sweet):
January 25th, 2010
This week’s image comes to you from the Fairy Caves, now part of the Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park, just outside of Glenwood Springs, Colorado:
The Fairy Caves were originally discovered over 100 years ago, and promptly opened to tourism. Unfortunately, the original owners didn’t realize that the Caves were “living” caverns — still growing stalactites and stalagmites. So they blasted openings into the caverns without realizing that they had in the process dropped the humidity to the point where the caverns’ features could no longer grow.
Fortunately, people learned over time, and so airlocks were installed — and you can now walk through at least some of the caverns without impeding their natural growth.
January 22nd, 2010
One of the longest-running sagas in the space age has been the quest for a practical, reuseable space plane. The space shuttle program’s winding down now, but it’s not as though it’s ever been the only game in town. Before it came along, there were multiple efforts to design a space plane (within NASA, in the military community, and of course in the then-U.S.S.R.). For most of the shuttle’s operational life, efforts within the U.S. to build anything similar were essentially shut down — but as the shuttle’s reliability issues became more apparent, and the end of its working life neared, interest started flaring up again.
For the U.S. Air Force, this took the form of the X-40 testbed, while NASA didn’t want to be left out and so started its own X-37 program — both unmanned, both started in 1996. But the programs’ political fortunes came and went with the usual political tides — in 2000, the Air Force’s X-40A craft was transferred to NASA for their use in testing X-37 technology. Then in 2004, NASA got tired of the now-combined program and gave it all back to the military, and it’s been a DARPA research project ever since.
Probably the best video to be released from either of the programs comes courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space magazine — it shows a 2001 drop test of the X-40A (back when NASA was running the show):
Since the program got handed back to the military, it seems to be moving along well. The January issue of Air & Space has an in-depth article on recent developments in the X-37 program, scheduled now for its first launch this summer on an Atlas V rocket. There’s also a good writeup on the history of the oddly intertwined X-37 and X-40 programs at a site called the Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles.
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