On April 21, the 2012 Lyrid meteor shower peaked in the skies over Earth. While NASA allsky cameras were looking up, astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station trained his video camera on Earth below. Video footage has revealed breathtaking images of meteors ablating — or burning up — over Earth at night. This video is a composite of 310 still frames from that evening. (NASA/JSC/Don Pettit)
Tag Archives: iss
Rock(et) man
Hmmm, this guy is getting old.
Soccer preferred
Tonight we had the one before last competition round of the Dutch Eredivisie, the primera division of Dutch soccer. It was exciting so I wasn’t much concerned with astronomy. Weather played a big role in tonight’s round, as thunder and lightning caused at least two games to be suspended for a while. But Ajax became national champion and there’s still batlle for second place.
In the mean time it seems SpaceX has some serious delays with the scheduled launch – that is, first scheduled on April the 30th, then May the 7th and now… who knows. Follow their twitter stream for updates. It just looks like the old days with Space Shuttles delayed, sometimes forever. And this time it’s not the weather.
Be an ATV couch-docking operator for ESA
Become a tablet astronaut with ESA’s ATV docking lessons on your own tablet:
Do you have what it takes to be an astronaut? ESA is making actual astronaut training available on your computer and tablet, so you can see for yourself.
ESA’s third Automated Transfer Vehicle, ATV Edoardo Amaldi, has safely docked with the International Space Station. ATV is the largest supply ship to fly to the Space Station. A truly international team effort, ATV-3 brought fresh food, fuel and supplies to the Station. … (ESA)
Download the Cortona3D viewer from the App shop and load the two ATV demos.
Robo says hello
Comment from Keith Cowing: On 12 March 2012, NASA’s Robonaut-2 said “hello world” in American Sign Language (ASL) from the International Space Station. I am told that the idea for this came from my suggestion posted on NASA Watch several months ago (below). How cool. … (SpaceRef)
Take a deep breath
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has “sniffed” molecular oxygen ions around Saturn’s icy moon Dione for the first time, confirming the presence of a very tenuous atmosphere. The oxygen ions are quite sparse – one for every 0.67 cubic inches of space (one for every 11 cubic centimeters of space) or about 2,550 per cubic foot (90,000 per cubic meter) – show that Dione has an extremely thin neutral atmosphere.
At the Dione surface, this atmosphere would only be as dense as Earth’s atmosphere 300 miles (480 kilometers) above the surface. The detection of this faint atmosphere, known as an exosphere, is described in a recent issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“We now know that Dione, in addition to Saturn’s rings and the moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules,” said Robert Tokar, a Cassini team member based at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M., and the lead author of the paper. “This shows that molecular oxygen is actually common in the Saturn system and reinforces that it can come from a process that doesn’t involve life.”
Dione’s oxygen appears to derive from either solar photons or energetic particles from space bombarding the moon’s water ice surface and liberating oxygen molecules, Tokar said. But scientists will be looking for other processes, including geological ones, that could also explain the oxygen. … (Cassini)
Somewhat closer to home
Neil Armstrong, the first person to set foot on the moon, thinks humanity should stop neglecting the space environment much closer to Earth.
The United States dropped most of its test flights in the stratosphere and suborbital space after figuring out how to send humans to low-Earth orbit and the moon, said Armstrong, who stepped onto the lunar surface during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. He thinks it’s time for that to change.
“In the suborbital area, there are a lot of things to be done,” Armstrong said here Monday (Feb. 27) during a presentation at the 2012 Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC-2012). “This is an area that has been essentially absent for about four decades, since the X-15 finished its job.”
The X-15 was a rocket plane that took to the skies 199 times between 1959 and 1968, setting numerous speed and altitude records along the way. Armstrong was at the controls for some of those flights; before becoming an astronaut in 1962, the moonwalker was a test pilot for NASA and its predecessor institution, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
The test flights of the X-15 and other experimental craft of the era helped pave the way for future vehicles, such as NASA’s iconic space shuttle. Further investigation and exploitation of suborbital space — this time led not by the government but by private industry — could provide more technological and economic benefits to the country, Armstrong said. … (SPACE.com)
