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When you’re a Muslim in orbit, how do you determine which way Mecca is and how often you need to pray? “The ISS is more than 200 miles from the Earth’s surface and orbits the earth every ninety-two minutes, or roughly sixteen times a day. Do we have to worship eighty times a day (sixteen orbits a day multiplied by five prayer times)?”
Photographs taken by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor suggest that liquid water may still run on Mars. Successive photos of crater gullies show activity in the last 4 years.
Top 100 photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, a singularly talented photographer.
Woo, NASA finally decides to fix the Hubble, repairs that will keep it working until at least 2013. “Scientists expect an upgraded Hubble to continue to make groundbreaking discoveries.”
Great photos of the Space Shuttle launch taken from the International Space Station. (via cyn-c)
Update: The photos weren’t taken from the ISS but from a chase plane. (thx, greg)
Space tourist Anousheh Ansari is Flickring photos from the International Space Station. NASA reportedly spent 250,000 man-hours building a module to upload snapshots from space via the Flickr API.
Update: That NASA man-hours stat is a joke, sorry. NASA is not that absurdly wasteful. I have no idea how she’s getting the photos on Flickr. Do they have web access on the ISS?
Update: Ansari called Larry Page today and reported that there’s no internet access on the ISS. Email is delivered in batches…so she’s either emailing them to Flickr or someone’s uploading them for her. BTW, the first kottke.org reader in space…could you give me a call when you get there? (thx, terrell)
Update: According to Ansari’s blog (from space!), email is sent from the ISS three times per day.
Yesterday, almost 30 years after it was launched, the Voyager spacecraft crossed the 100 AU boundry, meaning it is 100 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is. The article is worth a read. (via sb)
Video simulation of what might happen if a meteor strikes the earth.
Jupiter is growing another big red spot. The gas giant has been told by solar system pals to “keep an eye on it” and “have it checked out” if it gets any bigger.
Russia plans to drive a golf ball off of the ISS with a gold-plated, scandium alloy six-iron into a four-year, low-earth orbit….which may actually damage the space station if the ball is not “hit out of the station’s orbital plane”. I understand this event will be debuting at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
The issues involved with buying and selling moon dust. Back in 1993, a 200-milligram moon rock was sold for $442,500.
Middle school students in Indiana and Australia are building edible moon rovers, with the idea that if you’re going to ship a car to the moon or Mars, why not have it be edible when you get there?
A relativistic examination of gravity in the galaxy may indicate that the invention of dark matter may not be necessary to solve the not-enough-matter problem. “The motions of stars in galaxies is realized in general relativity’s equations without the need to invoke massive halos of exotic ‘dark matter’ that nobody can explain by current physics.”
Update: mjt has doubts about the paper referenced here and notes that there’s other evidence for dark matter that is not questioned by the above study.
Google and NASA have announced plans to collaborate on projects like “large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry”. In 6 months, Yahoo will announce a collaboration with the Russian Space Agency to launch original content into space. Microsoft will announce in a year that they’ve had space travel capabilities built into Office for years now but no one uses it…in two years time, they’ll completely reorg around manned missions to Mars.
Is PowerPoint responsible for the woes of the Space Shuttle? Well, no, but it’s not helping any. “The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America — the PowerPointing of the planet, actually — is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese.”
Space Shuttle Discovery lands safely, thank goodness.
Fantastic must-read article slamming NASA with regard to the Space Shuttle program. I’ve been following Maciej’s del.icio.us links about the Shuttle for weeks now and was wondering if he’d get around to writing it up. Worth the wait.
Google Moon: explore the Apollo landing sites in the Google Maps interface.
Space Shuttle launch scrubbed because of faulty fuel sensor.
The Space Shuttle is set to return to space today. Looks like you can watch a live video stream of the launch onthe web.
Explanation of NASA’s launch countdown. T-20 minutes doesn’t necessarily mean there’s 20 minutes until launch.
NASA Commission says Space Shuttle still not safe enough for flight.
Gaia telescope will map the Milky Way with 1.5 gigapixel camera.
After being grounded for more than two years, the Space Shuttle is set to launch next month.
We’re still finding lots of new moons around the planets in our solar systems. Twelve new ones were just discovered around Saturn and Jupiter now has 63.
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