Category: Sciency things

Today’s APOD is an amazing picture of Venus at the edge of it’s transit, taken by the Swedish Solar Telescope.
You can also see some cool movies taken by the Dutch Open Telescope.

Coming today to APOD, the newest deep space photo from Hubble, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image. The Hubble Deep Field showed hundreds of galaxies in an area previously thought to be dark and empty. Now, with the HUDF containng data from over 400 orbits looking at the same region of space over a 3 month period, I’m sure there will be even more to see, looking even farther back into time.
Lots of cool juicy info in the STSI newsletter

Today’s APOD photo is a very cool shot of Saturn taken from the rapidly approaching Cassinni probe. With arrival at Saturn scheduled for July 1, I’m looking forward to some exciting pictures and science in the coming months.

Well, this is disappointing. The BBC article (via Slashdot) reports NASA has decided Hubble is doomed to fall back to earth. No servicing mission to fix Hubble’s gyroscopes, no possibility of carting it back to display in a museum. NASA’s deemed a Hubble mission as too unsafe.
From the article,

Readdy, a former shuttle astronaut, said Nasa had already analysed the question of whether to send astronauts to fix Hubble, and determined that it was unsafe.
He added that Hubble offers no “safe haven” for astronauts seeking refuge from a damaged shuttle, while the ISS does.

Well, at least there’s still Herschel and the James Webb Telescope to look forward to..

Hmm, so President Bush wants to go back to the moon. While I am cautiously optimistic about renewed NASA funding, especially in light of the significant budget cuts NASA has experienced over the past decade, I’m still a little skeptical about Bush’s vision, especially considering this is an election year. Along with his immigrant worker proposal, it just smacks of political pandering to the masses to me. But in any case, more funding for NASA is always a good thing.
I know we’ve been to the moon before, but considering how we can hardly keep a space station in Earth orbit, I can’t see a moon base coming in my lifetime. I’ll be very happy to be proven wrong though.
Personally, I would like to see ISS construction and expansion continue with more support and participation from other countries, with the goal of using it as a launching pad for missions to the moon and Mars. Make ISS and future lunar and planetary missions a truly global effort.