Space Shuttle Lands
Very good to see the crew made it back safe and sound.
Space Shuttle Atlantis descended to a smooth landing at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., concluding a successful assembly mission to the International Space Station. With Commander Rick Sturckow and Pilot Lee Archambault at the controls, Atlantis landed at 3:49 p.m. EDT on Friday
Space Shuttle To Land Today?
The space shuttle Atlantis may have to stay on orbit a while longer until the weather decides to clear up.
Uncooperative weather at Kennedy Space Center, Fla., forced flight controllers to pass on STS-117’s first landing attempt today. The crew and the Mission Control team have turned their attention to the next orbit, which has opportunities available in Florida and at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.
NASA TV Schedule
NASA – Space Shuttle mission status
Kennedy Space Center Video Feeds (link 2)
All Systems Are Go! STS-117 Is Away
The space shuttle Atlantis has made a perfect launch on it’s service mission to install more power capacity on the International Space Station. Good work!
Space Shuttle Mission 117 (STS-117)
The countdown for the launch of Shuttle mission STS-117 has resumed at T-9 minutes after a scheduled hold. For more information quickly go over to the NASA Human Spaceflight web page and follow along.
Posted: June 8th, 2007
at 4:33pm by John
Categories: Cool,News,Space,Technology
Comments: No comments
Skiing Conditions On Mars, Not So Hot…
This throws a wrench into my summer vacation plans…
Using observations by NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, scientists have discovered that water ice lies at variable depths over small-scale patches on Mars.
The findings draw a much more detailed picture of underground ice on Mars than was previously available. They suggest that when NASA’s next Mars mission, the Phoenix Mars Lander, starts digging to icy soil on an arctic plain in 2008, it might find the depth to the ice differs in trenches just a few feet apart. The new results appear in the May 3, 2007, issue of the journal Nature.
"We find the top layer of soil has a huge effect on the water ice in the ground," said Joshua Bandfield, a research specialist at Arizona State University, Tempe, and author of the paper. His findings come from data sent back to Earth by the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on Mars Odyssey. The instrument takes images in five visual bands and 10 heat-sensing (infrared) ones.
NASA – Sharp Views Show Ground Ice on Mars Is Patchy and Variable
Earth Like Planet Virtualy Next Door
I was reading Boing Boing this morning and saw that an Earthlike planet may have been discovered just 20.5 light years away from our very home.
"We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid," explains Stéphane Udry, from the Geneva Observatory (Switzerland) and lead-author of the paper reporting the result. "Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky – like our Earth – or fully covered with oceans," he adds.
"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," avows Xavier Delfosse, a member of the team from Grenoble University (France). "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extra-terrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."This could be the most remarkable astronomical find of our lifetimes. I hope that science will be able to resolve some details about the planetary body soon. Maybe it will be found to hold water.
Astronomers Find First Earth-like Planet in Habitable Zone
More information about the Gilese star system can be found here:
Gliese 581 – Wikipedia
