Category: Sciency things

Huzzah!! NASA has given the go-ahead for one final Hubble servicing mission for the spring of 2008.

From the ScienceDaily release:

Shuttle astronauts will make one final house call to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope as part of a mission to extend and improve the observatory’s capabilities through 2013.

The flight is tentatively targeted for launch during the spring to fall of 2008. Mission planners are working to determine the best location and vehicle in the manifest to support the needs of Hubble while minimizing impact to International Space Station assembly. The planners are investigating the best way to support a launch on need mission for the Hubble flight. The present option will keep Launch Pad 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center, Fla., available for such a rescue flight should it be necessary.

There will be a lot for the astronauts to do on this servicing mission. Two new cameras are to be installed, gyroscope and battery replacement and an attempt to repair the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph are among many tasks to do.

This last mission should allow Hubble to operate at least until 2013 and fill in the gap until the James Webb telescope goes online.

The votes are in and the best images of the year taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory over the past 7 years are posted. Some of them are pretty spectacular too.

My favourite of the winners is the 2002 image of the Crab Nebula which shows x-ray emissions from the cloud of gas surrounding the pulsar at the nebula’s center.

There’s another really cool composite image of the Crab Nebula made up of the Chandra image, an optical image from Hubble and an infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Pretty, huh?

Heading into their third year on Mars, Spirit and Opportunity are still motoring along taking cool pictures, finding neat stuff and checking out more terrain.

Not bad for a couple of robots that were only supposed to last 3 months. Sounds like they’re beginning to suffer from aging though.

While showing signs of wear, Spirit and Opportunity are still being used to their maximum remaining capabilities. On Spirit, the teeth of the rover’s rock abrasion tool are too worn to grind the surface off any more rocks, but its wire-bristle brush can still remove loose coatings. The tool was designed to uncover three rocks, but it exposed interiors of 15 rocks.

On Opportunity, the steering motor for the front right wheel stopped working eight months ago. A motor at the shoulder joint of the rover’s robotic arm shows symptoms of a broken wire in the motor winding. Opportunity can still maneuver with its three other steerable wheels. Its shoulder motor still works when given extra current, and the arm is still useable without that motor.

Cool.

Well, probably not.

From Hubble and the ESA comes a stunning view of the Crab nebula.

Pretty, huh.