Happy Apollo 11 Launch Day

Posted on 2014-07-16 by Charlie

It was a school day, but dad’s rocket was going to take men to the moon!

Falcon 9 reusuable 1000m fin test video

Posted on 2014-06-18 by Charlie

This video’s got on-board cam and wide-angle shots of the entire flight. The landing gear catches on fire, which was apparently expected by SpaceX (later versions will fold up their landing tackle after liftoff) although a bit surprising for me at first viewing. This flight is to test a set of landing flaps they are calling “fins”.

1970s scientific spacecraft rebooted

Posted on 2014-06-09 by Charlie

ISEE-3, the International Sun/Earth Explorer 3, has been responding to signals. Thanks to crowdfunding and NASA, a group of space enthusiasts led by Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowingare are going to try to kick it back into Earth orbit, where it will resume its original mission after taking off into the outer system to chase comets decades ago.

Technicians are now racing to maneuver the spacecraft, which currently appears to be on a collision course with the Moon. It is unclear at this point whether they will be able to redirect the spacecraft in time.

Click here for current ISEE-3 Reboot Project status reports!

Obital Debris Quarterly

Posted on 2014-06-03 by Charlie

I find the Orbital Debris Quarterly to be more interesting than the title implies. For example the July sildenafil viagra de pfizer the joints. After using the sample, you can make the body strong free viagra canada and feel that strength within. Men with erection problem can make djpaulkom.tv levitra no prescription use of vacuum devices and there are also supplements that contain natural herbs for treating this particular condition. Besides the users, healthcare professionals also know the level of damage electromagnetic pollution can produce. women viagra order 1999 issue has an article about the early design of a patch kit used to fix micrometeorite punctures from the outside of the International Space Station.

SpaceX Dragon v2 revealed.

Posted on 2014-05-30 by Charlie

Xeni Jardin has pics and video at the Boing.

No Gamma Ray Burst in M31

Posted on 2014-05-28 by Charlie

Despite so much chatter in Twitter that even I’ve heard about it, there is no evidence of a world-destroying event in the Andromeda galaxy. Phil Evans from the SWIFT team explains:

…it’s tough. We have limited data, limited time and need to say something quick, while the object is still bright. People with access to large telescopes need to make a rapid decision, do they sink some of their limited observing time into this object? This is the challenge that we, as time-domain astronomers, face on a daily basis. Most of this is normally hidden from the world at large because of course we only publish and announce the final results from the cases where the correct decisions were made. In this case, thanks to the power of social media, one of those cases where what proved to be the wrong decision has been brought into the public eye. You’ve been given a brief insight into the decisions and challenges we have to face daily. So while it’s a bit embarrassing to have to show you one of the times where we got it wrong, it’s also good to show you the reality of science. For every exciting news-worthy discovery, there’s a lot of hard slog, effort, false alarms, mistakes, excitement and disappointment. It’s what we live off. It’s science.

New theories needed for star formation

Posted on 2014-05-09 by Charlie

“When zooming in on the young star clusters of NGC 2024 (in the center of the Flame Nebula) and the Orion Nebula Cluster, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up with infrared telescopes to take a census of star ages. Conventional thinking suggests that stars closest to the center of a given star cluster should be the oldest and the youngest stars can be found around the edges.

However, to their surprise, astronomers have discovered that the opposite is true.

‘Our findings are counterintuitive,’ said Konstantin Getman of Penn State University, lead scientist of this new study. ‘It means we need to think harder and come up with more ideas of how stars like our sun are formed.'”

Total Lunar Eclipse Tonight

Posted on 2014-04-14 by Charlie

“And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood” — Joel 2:30-1, KJV

NASA has more prosaic information, which should be more useful to most of us.

Here in the Eastern Daylight Time zone, the moon’s going to be completely full at 3:42:18 AM on 2014-04-15. The total eclipse will last from 3:07 to 4:25, peaking at 3:46, so it ought to be quite beautiful if the weather co-operates.

Since I worked all day and was in Boston all weekend, I will most likely be asleep. Enjoy it without me!

NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge offers $35,000 payout

Posted on 2014-04-03 by Charlie

From topcoder.com:

Welcome to the Asteroid Grand Challenge Series sponsored by the NASA Tournament Lab! The Asteroid Grand Challenge Series will be comprised of a series of topcoder challenges to get more people from around the planet involved in finding all asteroid threats to human populations and figuring out what to do about them. In an increasingly connected world, NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges. Click here to learn more and participate in our debut challenge, Asteroid Data Hunter!

NPR has an article about the series here.

A big week in science…

Posted on 2014-01-30 by Charlie

I didn’t believe in black holes until very recently. But my friends and relatives in the space telescope biz kept seeing things I couldn’t explain any other way, so despite my deep misgivings about Stephen Hawking’s attempts to explain how such things must work, and despite Einstein’s suspicions that their predicted existence was really simply a place where physics formulae break down (a “mathematical singularity” not necessarily corresponding to any real object), I eventually gave in.

So, now that I’ve grudgingly admitted black holes really do seem to exist, Hawking publishes a paper saying “The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field.” Arrgh! Now I have to find time to read more physics.

A more interesting and less aggravating scientific announcement was that physicists at Amherst have created a magnetic monopole! Their synthetic monopole exists at the particle level, but proving submicroscopic monopoles can exist is the first step towards finding out if larger monopoles can exist (most physicists say they can’t) and quite possibly a major step towards finding out if they occur in nature (most physicists say they can).

Finally and most importantly, a team of scientists working in the USA and Japan announced a breakthrough in stem-cell creation that potentially obviates all the kerfuffle about existing medical markets for aborted fetus cells.

Sun Dog

Posted on 2014-01-20 by Charlie

An excellent sun dog seems to have visited Moscow yesterday.

New Challenger Photos?

Posted on 2014-01-16 by Charlie

Over at Reddit there’s an ongoing discussion of some photos of the 1986 Challenger disaster.

The events of that day are pretty well seared into my memory, because I was working on the Morton Thiokol test range at the time, helping Ronald Reagan provide nuclear weapons capabilities to Arabs.

Francis Scobee (commanding), Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Greg Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe were the crew of STS-51L.

NASA Valkyrie flubs her first battle

Posted on 2013-12-23 by Charlie

The guys at Johnson entered their Valkyrie robot into the DARPA Robotics Challenge and she got zero points.

Despite this poor performance, I love the Valkyrie, basically because the designers purposely included “must look cool” in their objectives. I’m sure she’ll do better in the future.

The other NASA robot competing (JPL’s Robosimian) did much better, coming in fifth and looking reasonably cool. The winner was the boring looking Japanese SCHAFT S-1, recently purchased by Google as part of their huge push into robotics.

Falcon Nine should be on the pad by now… yup.

Posted on 2013-11-25 by Charlie

SpaceX has their newest version of the Falcon9 ready to lift a Canadian telecommunications satellite for Orbital Sciences. The live webcast starts at 5pm EDT.

Update: Missed the launch window, mission scrubbed until Thanksgiving.

Update: Scrubbed again… after ignition, which is a good trick. Not clear yet if it’s the same problem, but they’re taking the bird down to look at the engines and will try again in a few days.

Another successful Minotaur launch!

Posted on 2013-11-20 by Charlie

The Minotaur family of rockets use motors originally designed for intercontinental nuclear missiles, repurposing weapons of mass destruction for scientific missions.

The Minotaur I & II are based on the Minuteman II, a cold war ICBM which my father helped build.

The Minotaur III through VI+ are based on the Peacekeeper (MX missile) which both my father and I worked on during the Reagan era.

Orbital Sciences Corporation, which builds the minotaurs for the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center’s Space Development and Test Directorate, also uses Dad’s STAR motors (originally engineered for Pegasus and Delta vehicles) in the upper stages.

NASA’s latest Minotaur launched from Wallops last night contained 28 mini-satellites, one of which was built by Thomas Jefferson High School.

MAVEN Mars mission liftoff

Posted on 2013-11-18 by Charlie

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remains of a better woodhenge

Posted on 2013-11-07 by Charlie

It it’s not Scottish, it’s crrrrrrrrap!

“Our excavations revealed a fascinating glimpse into the cultural lives of people some 10,000 years ago – and now this latest discovery further enriches our understanding of their relationship with time and the heavens.”

There’s a paper at the Internet Archaeology online peer-reviewed professional journal (pay site, obviously).

Interesting arxiv physics article to pass the time.

Posted on 2013-10-30 by Charlie

I have long held that time is an emergent phenomena of our meat-based consciousness that has no reality outside our frame of reference. The link’s to an article, based on an extremely difficult to digest paper, about an experiment that attempts to solve the problem of time by testing the theory that time is an emergent phenomenon based on quantum entanglement. If time’s not real outside the observational cone of human experience, then it’s possible to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics and the problem of time is no longer a problem for mathematicians.

Honestly, the math’s way over my head. But the popular treatments are interesting, at least.

dragon splashdown!

Posted on 2012-05-31 by Charlie

The SpaceX Dragon previously blogged splashed down successfully at 11:42AM Pacific time (10:42 Eastern). Coverage here and at the boing (hi, Xeni!). No word yet as to the presence of verminicious knids.

Given the FAA’s recent launch approval of Scaled Composites’ Spaceship Two for space tourism agency Virgin Galactic, it appears we have finally entered the age of commercial space flight.

Musk capsule snagged by ISS

Posted on 2012-05-25 by Charlie

If I lived on the left coast, I think I’d work for Elon Musk.

Today Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, successfully delivered a payload to the International Space Station with their Dragon spacecraft, launched from a Falcon 9 vehicle. Last year the Dragon was the first commercially built spacecraft to return from orbit; today it was the first privately built spacecraft to dock with an orbiting platform.

In celebration, here’s a video interview with moonwalker Neil Armstrong, in four parts:
part 1 – part 2 – part 3 – part 4

Bonus video: Buzz Aldrin punching a heckler!

Typing Animal

this is the blog part

Category Archives: space