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Sign up now: your 7-day excursion to on the Moon

Posted on Sunday, September 30, 2007

Doing some overdue reading on developments in the space explo arena, I am struck by below slides depicting an assessment of possible Lunar sorties in NASA's latest Lunar Architecture update (Sep'07). They give a pretty good first grasp of the distances involved when future astronauts r gonna have a great time driving around the Lunar surface with their Moon buggies. Looking forward to joining them near real time from behind my computer (with only a 1.5 sec lightspeed delay). Another report text worth a look at is the Global Exploration Strategy (May'07) as it provides an interesting (albeit somewhat romantic) view of space explo in an effort to globally coordinate space exploration agendas into a global exploration strategy. Harnessing the collective space intelligence...

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Waiting for Fotino

Posted on Friday, September 28, 2007

A group of Polish/Russian engineers were installed on the Kazach steppe in anticipation of the Fotino capsule landing. Unfortunately, it never came...

Finally: a peak inside online mapviewing behaviour

Posted on Thursday, September 27, 2007

What are we looking at in online interactive mapping systems such as Microsoft's Live Search or Google Earth/Maps? Interesting stuff to wonder about. All Points Blog thinks so too and links to a paper by Microsoft researcher Danyel Fisher entitled Hotmap, Looking at Geographic Attention (above image shows one of many intruiging images from the paper, this one depicting a bright spot at Latitude/Longitude (0,0)).

Space Roulette

Posted on Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The YES2 mission is still ongoing...surprisingly! Turns out the tether deployed only 8.5 km of the intended 30 km, resulting in a much lower delta-V decrease than anticipated and leaving the capsule circling the Earth instead of landing within a couple of hours after ejection. The team is currently assessing the orbital parameters, providing a first estimate of the capsule remaining in orbit for at least 4-11 days more before re-entering into the atmosphere. And even better, they have at this time no clue where the capsule is going to land. Even if its technically considered a non-nominal situation, the extended mission and uncertainties of where it is going to land make it even more exciting. I have informed whether they are taking bets on the eventual landing site but sofar no reaction ;). Read more details at this mission summary.

YES2 mission ongoing

Posted on Tuesday, September 25, 2007

YES2 has deployed safely and the team currently awaiting a signal from the capsule which has supposedly landed somewhere in Kazachstan. Read the full up-to-the-minute story on the YES2 blog.

YES2 almost ready for deployment

Posted on Monday, September 24, 2007

The YES2 mission is almost ready to go. If the temperature lords permit, tomorrow, Tuesday 25th September, the Fotino capsule will be ejected from the Foton spacecraft and with the use of a 30-km tether swung back to the Earth to a targeted landing point somewhere on the steppes of Kazachstan. Follow the news as it seeps in from Moskow Mission Control TsUP at the YES2 mission blog.

Evolutionary benefit from Space Explo

Posted on Thursday, September 20, 2007

Reading up on the Google Lunar X Prize at the BBC I come across this quote from Peter Diamandis, X Prize founder (and ISU founder):

"We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration," said Dr Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation in a statement.

A launch US style

Posted on Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Somewhat different from the YES2 launch (earlier post), this Delta-2 rocket carrying WorldView-1 (soon in a GoogleEarth near you) follows the rocket all the way up to MECO, 2nd stage ignition and fairing separation. Quite an impressive video (via O'Reilly Radar)

Powers of Ten: still your best guide on what's coming

Posted on Tuesday, September 18, 2007

With Google Sky just released, the news of an upcoming Google Body (slideshow) makes me tempted to make a graph with all Powers of Ten from the 1977 movie and see at what level scientific research, government research agenda's and corporate interests are playing out (and not to forget: the military agenda!). Seems this Powers of Ten paradigm (often quoted as inspiration for Google Earth) is still your best bet at trying to understand and predict human progress these days, not only in terms of research but also in terms of accessibility of these non-human scales to average citizens through tools such as Google Earth.

This weekend I had another brief encounter with Google Sky after my initial confusion a few weeks ago from lack of reference while scrolling the skies. This time it was a lot better, although I still think an actual 3D representation, at least of the Solar System, would be way cooler than the MyFirstPlanets representations currently moving around Google's heaven (have you seen the demo tour in Celestia yet?). The current sky implementation feels more like a representation of how old civilisations once thought stars were holes in the black heaven sphere with fire behind it making them shine like they do. Its a good beginning, but they definitely need to catch up with 21st century cosmology.

YES2 in orbit update

Posted on Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Foton is making its rounds around the Earth with YES2 switched off. Apparently the Russians don't have active attitude control on the Foton platform so they are reluctant to switch on YES2 for a check out of the temperature profile because it might be too hot or too cold (...don't ask me about the logical behind this reasoning...;). The first time the team will find out whether or not their baby is still alive in orbit is next week Tuesday when the final sequence starts. Untill then, don't let go of those crossed fingers!

YES2 launch: sketchy videos from ESTEC

Posted on Monday, September 17, 2007

New head of the education office Francesco Emma gives a brief introduction about YES2 project:



The actual launch "no countdown, just press the button" style:

YES2 in orbit

Posted on Friday, September 14, 2007

YES2 had a flawless ride to Low Earth Orbit today lifting off from Baikonur Space Center at 13:00 CET sharp (more at ESA's webportal). Back here at ESTEC, a pretty large crowd gathered to witness the launch via a live satellite link. The weird thing with these Russian launches is that they don't have a countdown, so while an ESA official was filling the silence with everybody awaiting the launch, suddenly the rocket engines lit up, the tower cleared away, and the rocket lifted off from the launch pad with a big roar. In less than 3 minutes, the cameras couldn't see the rocket anymore and the only news of a succesful orbit insertion came some 9 minutes after lift-off when a voice over a barely hearable telephone line from TsUP, Moskow Mission control, gave the good news of an all-nominal mission....that was it! Somewhat of an anti climax. But alas, the real YES2 mission will anyway not start before September 24th when the command is issued to release the Fotino capsule from Foton and the 30-km tether will swing the capsule to a targeted landingsite on the Kazach steppe. I hear there is a 'silence' policy over at ESA in terms of covering the actual YES2 mission as it unfolds (after all, it could go wrong...duh!?), so I'll try to give you some updates here and there although its probably gonna be sparse because I am not in the direct loop anymore and I have some other priorities to take care of. The YES2 team will be over at TsUP at the moment supreme so there is always the YES2 blog. Btw, did any of you try to watch the event online? Did it work? I got a message saying the live stream was down before it even started (what's the phrase again '...its no rocket science...!?'). Ps, video of the launch I captured at ESTEC is coming. I am presently in a restaurant in Leiden with a very(!) asynchronous connection (upload very tight), so will do this over the weekend.

Google + X PRIZE = Lunar X PRIZE + Google Moon

Posted on Thursday, September 13, 2007

Update: more at Wired & CNN.

Just in: Google Sponsors Lunar X PRIZE to Create a Space Race for a New Generation. More at googlelunarxprize.org. At the same time, Google's LatLon blog announces an update to their version of Google Moon, an outcome of the collaboration between Google and NASA Ames.

YES2 ready for launch (oh, and Foton-M3 too ;)

Posted on Thursday, September 13, 2007

Tomorrow (friday 14th) is the big day: YES2 will be launched from Kazachstan onboard a Soyuz rocket. I'll be heading out to ESTEC here in the Netherlands to be part of the official ESA videocast of the launch (too bad I didn't make it out to Kazachstan). Word from Erik@Delta-Utec has it that the launch will also be available through the Internet @ this link. If you really want to get into the spirit, before launch time (around lunch time 13:00 CET, see schedule here) have a look at this splendid YES2-Baikonur photo album by Fabio de Pascale, one of two YES2 engineers on site at the Baikonur space center to witness the launch in person (see here for more good prep images, like the ones below). [below Image Credits: ESA - S. Corvaja 2007]

DinnerTV: South Park meets World of Warcraft

Posted on Thursday, September 13, 2007

I just read that one of the best pieces of television in a looooooooooong time has just won an Emmy (in Dutch). I've watched it over and over again, and for once this episode remains funny even after seeing it more than 10 times. Strangely enough, I've never found a good version on the Internet to share with you...until now. If you can handle the somewhat lower resolution and the annoying logos flying in and out of the screen in this 'official' online version (is YouTube going to be like this? I hope not!) then enjoy: South Park meets World of Warcraft (be sure to check the full screen button).

Today's NASA Slogan: All Your Space Are Belong To U.S.

Posted on Sunday, September 9, 2007

Wired is running a crowdsurfing NASA slogan contest to see if its readers can come up with a better slogan than the recently selected "NASA explores for answers that power our future". Starting out as a gimmicky blogpost (read a long list of proposed-slogans-as-comments here), the large number of entries have moved the contest to a more sophisticated system (the NASA Slogan Reddit Tool!) where people can cast votes on the various entries. Above image shows the top-6 of today, Sunday September 9th 2007.

Sofar, many of the proposed slogans go back to NASA's glorious past, poking fun at present-day achievements. With the CEV vehicle (aka Orion) resembling Apollo all the way down to the parachuted landing (water or land, what does it really matter?), having a slogan referring to the successes of the past seems to me to match NASA's own state of mind (yep, its the the wisdom of crowds allright). In that sense, having a slogan bringing back the glory days of NASA isn't all that far fetched if you ask me...I mean, how inspirational is this graph:



compared to this image:



Would be nice to have the WIRED contest run indefinite while NASA's Vision for Space Exploration unfolds, having something like a NASA Slogan Zeitgeist over the coming decades. Btw, if you're interested, some more background information on NASA Strategic Communications can be found in this powerpoint pdf.

Geoweb In The News

Posted on Sunday, September 9, 2007

'The world on Your Desktop' in The Economist, a fair read (with a good introduction over at OgleEarth) plus a first commentary on the article at TechConsumer (both via OgleEarth).