ISS capture of SpaceX’s Dragon is confirmed, becoming the first private vessel to dock with the space station.

(Source: nasa.gov)

SpaceX’s is Dragon about to dock with ISS. Watch here.

fuckyeahspaceshuttle:

Chute Deployed

With its drag chute deployed, space shuttle Columbia touches down on Runway 33 at Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility at 6:46:34 a.m. EDT. During the Microgravity Science Laboratory-1 mission, the Spacelab module was used to test some of the hardware, facilities and procedures that are planned for use on the International Space Station while the flight crew conducted combustion, protein crystal growth and materials processing experiments. 

This mission was a reflight of the STS-83 mission that lifted off from Kennedy in April of the same year. That space flight was cut short due to indications of a faulty fuel cell. 

newsweek:

nwkarchivist:

50 Years Ago, Newsweek Was Astronaut/Moon Crazy

Awesome style, us.

Nature.com:

NASA aims for human rendezvous at Mars in 2033

It would be the most precious cargo since the Apollo astronauts returned Moon rocks to Earth. In 2033, humans would arrive in Mars orbit in order to pick up and return to Earth a canister containing the hopes and dreams of Mars scientists: a small collection of Mars rocks that would have been previously collected and put into orbit.

An internal NASA study group, tasked with replanning the agency’s beleaguered Mars programme, revealed on Tuesday that it was using this working scenario and date as a goal. The group has been tasked with finding ways of getting the human and robotic sides of NASA to work together more. In return for supplemental funds from the human programme and the technology office, the robotic science missions might, for instance, include experiments useful for the human programme, such as radiation detectors or optical communication demonstrations.

While the administration of President Barack Obama has said before that it would like to put humans in the vicinity of Mars by the early 2030s, this is the first articulation I’ve seen of a specific, shared date for the key goal of both the human and robotic sides. Orlando Figueroa, a former NASA official leading the study group, presented the working plans on Wednesday to a newly convened committeeof the National Academies responsible for astrobiology and planetary science.

Some of the committee members weren’t too thrilled to be wedded to the human programme. Some pointed out that the technological challenges in getting people to Mars are much greater — and much more expensive — than sending a robot. Such a long mission not only requires new rocketry to get there, but also new materials that would shield astronauts from the intense radiation that exists outside the comfortable environment of the Earth and its magnetosphere. Figueroa says that a robotic retrieval mission could be sent instead in 2033.

Figueroa also mentioned four possible scientific pathways that could define the new Mars programme. My distillation of them are as follows:

1) Proceed, as quickly as the budget allows, with the existing plans for the first stage of a Mars sample return mission: sending a rover to a specific site to identify and cache intriguing samples that would later be lifted into orbit and returned.

2) Do surface science at as many as three sites — increasing the time before samples are returned but increasing the probability that one of the sites has preserved life.

3) Shift away from the singled-minded focus on sample return and perform more generalized Mars “system science”, which could include atmospheric and interior investigations.

4) Consider the possibility that the Curiosity rover, due to land at Gale Crater in August, makes a breakthrough discovery that motivates an intense and immediate follow-up study.

Figueroa’s group is supposed to submit its final report to NASA later this summer.

Photo: This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light.

fuckyeahspaceshuttle:

First Landing of Columbia

After completing the first full test of the Space Transportation System, mission STS-1, space shuttle Columbia is seen here on the Rogers dry lake, Runway 23, at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. From this aerial view, Columbia is seen as it is being convoyed to a parking area. 

mothernaturenetwork:

NASA scope sees light from alien planet about twice the size of Earth
The planet designated 55 Cancri e is likely a rocky world covered with water in a supercritical fluid state and topped off with a steam blanket.

Fermi Epicycles: The Vela Pulsar’s Path 
Credit: NASA, DOE, International Fermi LAT Collaboration

Explanation: Exploring the cosmos at extreme energies, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits planet Earth every 95 minutes. By design, it rocks to the north and then to the south on alternate orbits in order to survey the sky with its Large Area Telescope (LAT). The spacecraft also rolls so that solar panels are kept pointed at the Sun for power, and the axis of its orbit precesses like a top, making a complete rotation once every 54 days. As a result of these multiple cycles the paths of gamma-ray sources trace out complex patterns from the spacecraft’s perspective, like this mesmerising plot of the path of the Vela Pulsar. Centered on the LAT instrument’s field of view, the plot spans 180 degrees and follows Vela’s position from August 2008 through August 2010. The concentration near the center shows that Vela was in the sensitive region of the LAT field during much of that period. Born in the death explosion of a massive star within our Milky Way galaxy, the Vela Pulsar is a neutron star spinning 11 times a second, seen as the brightest persistent source in the gamma-ray sky.

theatlantic:

Picture of the Day: A ‘Remarkable’ Outburst From a Black Hole in a Neighboring Galaxy

In Messier 83, a barred spiral galaxy some 15 million light years away (“nearby,” by cosmic standards), scientists have observed a “remarkable” outburst from a black hole — its X-ray output has increased by a factor of 3,000. The above image on the left comes from optical data collected by the Very Large Telescope in Chile and shows the whole galaxy. On the right is a zoomed-in section combining data from NASA’s Chandra and Hubble telescopes, with Chandra’s X-ray data shown in pink and Hubble’s optical data appearing in blue. The “ultraluminous X-ray source” (ULX) is the bright pink dot near the bottom of the right-hand image. The brightening that Chandra observed over a several-year period is one of the largest changes in X-ray output ever observed from a black hole.

[Image: NASA]

Hubble Captures Full View of Uranus’ Rings on Edge

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures a rare view of the entire ring system of the planet Uranus, tilted edge-on to Earth.

The rings were photographed with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on August 14, 2007.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Showalter (SETI Institute) and Z. Levay (STScI)

Many Bright Clouds on Uranus

A recent Hubble Space Telescope view reveals Uranus surrounded by its four major rings and by 10 of its 17 known satellites. This false-color image was generated by Erich Karkoschka using data taken on August 8, 1998, with Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer.

Credit: Erich Karkoschka (University of Arizona) and NASA/ESA 

Southern Crab Nebula

A tempestuous relationship between an unlikely pair of stars may have created an oddly shaped, gaseous nebula that resembles an hourglass nestled within an hourglass.

The possible creators of these shapes cannot be seen at all in this Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 image. It’s a pair of aging stars buried in the glow of the tiny, central nebula.

Credit: Romano Corradi, Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain; Mario Livio, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.; Ulisse Munari, Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova-Asiago, Italy; HugoSchwarz, Nordic Optical Telescope, Canarias, Spain; andNASA/ESA

A Change of Seasons on Saturn

Looming like a giant flying saucer in our outer solar system, Saturn puts on a show as the planet and its magnificent ring system nod majestically over the course of its 29-year journey around the Sun. These Hubble Space Telescope images, captured from 1996 to 2000, show Saturn’s rings open up from just past edge-on to nearly fully open as it moves from autumn towards winter in its Northern Hemisphere.

Looming like a giant flying saucer in our outer solar system, Saturn puts on a show as the planet and its magnificent ring system nod majestically over the course of its 29-year journey around the Sun.

These Hubble Space Telescope images, captured from 1996 to 2000, show Saturn’s rings open up from just past edge-on to nearly fully open as it moves from autumn towards winter in its Northern Hemisphere.

Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

Hubble reveals previously unseen shocks

This new, detailed, Hubble image shows a planetary nebula in the making of a proto-planetary nebula. A dying star (hidden behind dust and gas in the centre of the nebula) has ejected massive amounts of gas. Parts of the gas have reached tremendous velocities of up to one-and-a-half million kilometres per hour. Shown in blue is light from hydrogen and ionised nitrogen arising from supersonic shocks where the gas stream rams into the surrounding material. The image shows for the first time these complex gas structures which are predicted by theory. The Hubble image was taken shortly before Christmas 2000 with the WFPC2 instrument (Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2) in four different filters. Here, light from 791 nm is displayed in red (exposure time 900 s), 675 nm in green (900 s), while combined light from hydrogen (656 nm) and ionised nitrogen atoms (658 nm) are shown as blue (14, 700 s).

Credit: ESA & Valentin Bujarrabal (Observatorio Astronomico Nacional, Spain)