Breezes of Heaven

Jupiter: Juno Perijove 06 from Sean Doran on Vimeo.


"As soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking on the moon and Jupiter... Given ships or sails adapted to the breezes of heaven, there will be those who will not shrink from even that vast expanse."  -- Ovid


Cyclones as big as the planet Mars - dozens of them - cover the poles of the planet Jupiter. A spacecraft named for the mythical Jupiter's wife, Juno, has traveled the 300 million plus miles and is capturing the best images yet of this giant planet.

Here on Earth, we have observed and studied Jupiter for thousands of years, and we've never had such astounding images or detailed measurements. 

More on the mission itself here.

The Last Neighbor - Pluto

If you have more than 3 moons you're a planet in my book, but Pluto is what it is - a wee dwarf planet. It looks huge in the pictures now coming in from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. (Great links to the mission via KnoxViews, where Randy notes "It will take 16 months to download all the data and images collected by the probe... At 3 billion miles away, it takes 4.5 hours for signals to reach Earth.)

Here's the man who first sighted Pluto in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, who is actually on-board the New Horizons probe ... well, a portion of Clyde's ashes are on-board. An 11-year old English school girl suggested the name Pluto.

There is a human fondness for the wee world.

It's also essentially our last neighbor here in this Solar neighborhood, and beyond it we see an infinity of galaxies and neighborhoods - and our little neighborhood appears very small.

Nearly Drowning in Outer Space

 Check out this harrowing account from astronaut Luca Parmitano about an unusual and nearly deadly accident - water filling up his space helmet while outside the International Space Station.

Read the entire account here, which details the event and reveals his steady and calm resolve to reach safety. An excerpt:

"The water has also almost completely covered the front of my visor, sticking to it and obscuring my vision. I realise that to get over one of the antennae on my route I will have to move my body into a vertical position, also in order for my safety cable to rewind normally. At that moment, as I turn ‘upside-down’, two things happen: the Sun sets, and my ability to see – already compromised by the water – completely vanishes, making my eyes useless; but worse than that, the water covers my nose – a really awful sensation that I make worse by my vain attempts to move the water by shaking my head. By now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can’t even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid."

Camilla - NASA's Rubber Chicken Celebrity

It's rather odd and unnerving that I'm jealous of a rubber chicken. And not just any rubber chicken. This rubber chicken gets to be an astronaut and mascot for NASA while I remain earthbound.

Camilla Corona is a social media mogul as "she" provides educational and public relations for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. She tweets, blogs, and apparently fascinates the world ...

"This chicken has some weird addictive quality that goes across borders and language barriers,” Wiseman said. “I took her to Red Square one day and it was unbelievable.” He said he was constantly surrounded by people who wanted to take pictures of Camilla, most of whom had no idea what his or Camilla’s story was.

"So how did Camilla go from anonymous rubber chicken to astronaut-in-training? Romeo Durscher, senior manager at SDO and executive assistant to Camilla, says that Camilla’s social media efforts began in late 2009, before the official launch of the mission. They had decided to make Camilla their mascot, something which initially started as an inside joke among the SDO team. But they quickly realized social media was an opportunity to teach the public about the sun and solar weather and that Camilla — the hilariously adorable chicken that she was — could be a great teacher."

Camilla's Twitter feed (boasting 7,300 followers) is here.

None can argue that Camilla is darned cute.

The Last Space Shuttle

The space shuttle Endeavour and International Space Station shine front and center in this amazing (and historic) photo of the two vehicles docked together as seen from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Astronaut Paolo Nespoli snapped this view and others during the first-ever photo session of a shuttle docked at the space station.

Shuttle really isn't a great name and doesn't inspire the same way that the word 'rocket' does.

But perched here on the final hours of the U.S. Space Shuttle program, one can't dismiss the historic role this decades-long program has played, both of triumph and tragedy.

First pondered as a 'Space Plane' back in the mid-1950s, it was President Nixon who gave the final okay for deployment, and for over 30 years this first-of-its-kind ship (a re-usable spacecraft) put space travel (even though it aimed only for low-orbit work) into a nearly dismissible routine event. But two tragic accidents, one on launch and one on re-entry, highlighted that this immensely complex scientific process could never be considered mundane work.

Some major achievements the Shuttle made possible - the creation of orbiting space stations and experimental orbiting platforms, and setting up and repairing the Hubble telescope, which has given our world a stunning new perspective on our universe and all that it contains.

As one NASA space operations chief said in late June of this year - "We've gone from where we went to space, and we touched space and we came back. We now are really in the posture where we're learning to live in space and operate in space."

The aurora australis, or southern lights, shimmer beyond Endeavour's vertical fin in a 1994 long-exposure picture. Endeavour was named after the ship commanded by James Cook, the 18th-century British explorer, navigator, and astronomer. The name was chosen through a national competition involving students in U.S. elementary and secondary schools.

The Shuttle fleet has flown 134 times, as much as nine times a year, though it has been used, far, far longer than first envisioned, and a lack of direction and financing now means that for the near future, our space program will depend on other nations to carry astronauts and cargo into orbit. Where we go from here is still mostly unknown.

I'm a total space nerd (one of my earliest posts showed my geekery). And this last Shuttle flight marks the end of an era, as millions if not billions of folks in our world have lived when this program was a constant event. NASA offers a constant online update of this final flight.

Many consider the money and materials and lives it takes for space exploration a waste, but the reality is that our very nature is to explore our world and all the mysteries of our universe. The waste would be if we simply stop and believe we can't reach for the stars.

Apollo 11-- 40 Years Later

Despite what I and many others thought on July 20, 1969, so far only 12 people have walked on the surface of the moon. The first two - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin - literally flew in on sheer will-power and some dicey technology.

Some sharp color images from all the Apollo moon landings are here in full panorama views.

NASA is holding several key celebrations of the 40th anniversary.

But as much tremendous respect as I have for NASA and their achievements, I wonder if it is time to create a new agency, supported by our government and our nation, which is focused more on the future than the past, an agency which makes plans for tomorrow's children.

It's a bit sad to think of the achievements as part of America's history and not it's future. Combined with the recent death of you-are-there news anchor Walter Cronkite , it seems too many in our nation are content to let our dreams of moving past life on Earth be a memory rather than a goal.

The Golden Record

30 years ago today, the efforts of a collection of humans sent something fantastic into space, which continues to travel through the stars.

Voyager and it's Golden Record stand as a marvel of human achievement.

"The record represented the idea that science and technology could come together with art,” said Ann Druyan, who also designed the sound essay.. “It’s one of the few totally great stories that we have about humans. It cost the taxpayers virtually nothing, nobody got killed. It was a way to celebrate the glory of being alive on this tiny blue dot in 1977."

“This was the most romantic and beautiful project ever attempted by NASA. It had the sounds of a kiss, a mother saying hello to her newborn baby for the first time, all that glorious music. Remember, this was during the Cold War. Everyone was living with the knowledge that 50,000 nuclear weapons could go off at any time, and there was a lot of angst about the future. This was something positive -- a way to represent Earth and put our best foot forward. That was irresistible.”

Carl Sagan’s son Nick was six years old in 1977 when the Voyager records were being assembled. The records feature a recording of him as a child saying, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

“I had no sense of the magnitude of it at the time,” said Nick Sagan, who partially followed in his late father’s footsteps by pursuing a career as a science fiction writer. “Literally it was my parents putting me in front of a microphone and saying, ‘What would you say to extraterrestrials?’”

Sagan said he began to realize what the record meant as he got older, and as a teen he started to realize what a “strange but wonderful honor” it was.

“It’s been a challenge for the rest of my life to live up to that honor. It’s always there in my subconscious,” he said. “My dad inspired so many people to do so many great things -- to not take things at face value and to look at evidence to search for the truth. It’s something that I look to as a beacon.”

Explore the Golden Record for yourself here.