Tag Archives: NASA

Today’s pretty picture

Posted on June 2, 2007 | Comments Off on Today’s pretty picture

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The Sombrero Galaxy, in a composite photo of X-ray, visible light, and infrared. An unbarred spiral in the Constellation Virgo. A mere 28 million light years away./NASA 

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Record snowfall

Posted on May 4, 2007 | Comments Off on Record snowfall

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December 25, 2004’s record snow in Texas of anywhere from two to six inches, including the most snow in Brownsville in 109 years. We have pix of Mr. B. romping in it at the rancho. I think that might be Lake Travis, the dark spot in the white, top left. Satellite view, courtesy of NASA’s Visible Earth. 

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Posted in Texana, Weather/Climate

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Tintypes from Jupiter

Posted on May 2, 2007 | Comments Off on Tintypes from Jupiter

New shots of Jupiter and its moons, from a passing NASA spacecraft on the way to Pluto, are pretty enough but raise the question of why all but a few are in black-and-white? No explanation I can find on the NASA sites. Maybe it’s because it will be so dark at Pluto, so far from the sun, that there’s no point in trying for color?

"New Horizons came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on Feb. 28 in a gravity assist maneuver designed to trim three years off its travel time to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach, the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700 observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that information back to Earth." 

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More moon base

Posted on February 21, 2007 | Comments Off on More moon base

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More good, if a few trifle far-fetched, reasons to return to the moon, by former moon astronaut Buzz Aldrin who recalls looking back from its surface in 1969 to "…the cloudy blue ball that should only be mankind’s starter home." The plan is to put the base at the moon’s south pole, where there is some evidence of water ice and more shelter from the sun, and rotate astronaut teams in and out every six months. Top of the far-fetched list, it seems to me, is beaming solar energy home, but the argument’s at least as interesting as the space elevator. /NASA

Via Instapundit 

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Posted in Science/Engineering, Space

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School for exploration

Posted on February 14, 2007 | Comments Off on School for exploration

When the shuttles began flying in 1981, I thought it was the beginning of the real exploration of the solar system. Instead, most of the money went to support those low-orbit flights. Now that a return to the moon is the next plan–along with retirement of what remains of the expensive shuttle fleet–I have to wonder if there’ll ever be enough money for it. It would certainly be a better investment, as this NASA article explains:

"’We need to set up shop on the Moon for one clear and understandable reason,’ he concludes. ‘The Moon is a school for exploration.’"

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Today’s pretty picture

Posted on February 13, 2007 | Comments Off on Today’s pretty picture

Helix Nebula.jpg

The Helix Nebula in infrared, 700 light years away, in the constellation Aquarius./NASA 

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A surfeit of astronauts

Posted on February 9, 2007 | Comments Off on A surfeit of astronauts

The story behind the story of astronaut Lisa Nowak’s cross-country odyssey of love gone wrong isn’t just NASA’s problem of psychological evaluation of future crews for the space station, moon base or Mars exploration, i.e. what if this had happened in space? It’s a hidden one of the space agency’s recruiting too many astronauts in the first place. They’ve created a surplus of high achievers chasing too few flights. Not to mention the problem of what to do with them after the peak experience they’ve been aiming at for so long is suddenly over? Nowak waited a decade before finally getting into low orbit last summer. Her chances of flying again before another decade passed were poor even before her escapade made them nonexistent.

UPDATE Nowak has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder. 

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