Space News

“Nobody took it seriously, saying it would burn instantly.”

Japanese scientists and origami masters hope to launch a paper airplane from space and learn from its trip back to Earth. via Hartford Courant

“Having partly burned up in the Earth's dense atmosphere, Progress ended its existence in the designated area in the southern Pacific”

Russia's Progress M-63 space cargo ship was successfully 'buried' on Monday at a spaceship cemetery in the southern Pacific, a Mission Control spokesman said. via RIA Novosti

“We know our technique works because it has passed every test with flying colors.”

At 3.8 times the mass of our Sun and estimated at only 15 miles in diameter, the black hole known as XTE J1650 is also close to the smallest size thought to be theoretically possible for such an object. via Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine

Insight for Living Chuck Swindoll CLOSE CLOSE Music News Casting Crowns Lead Singer, Mark Hall Adds New Custom-Designed "Star Wars" Desk to Office: Aside from fronting GRAMMY-winning band Casting Crowns and his ... via KKLA-FM Glendale

SSTL specializes in the design and manufacture of small and micro satellites. The company says the deal would provide the financial and industrial resources required for it to expand. via EETimes.eu

“But there are ways to solve the problem”

WILMINGTON: Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA's top climate scientist says. via The Times of India

Samsung's NV compact digital camera holds the honor of being the first of its kind to be used at a space station. via Gizmonews

“Over time, I think the response has shifted. Now, people just think it was a funny joke.”

If you believed everything you heard or read yesterday, presidential candidates would settle their race in a bowling alley, a cat park would be coming soon to a vacant lot in Annapolis, and a new e-mail service could send messages back in time.

From cyberspace to outer space, April Fools' Day pranks ran rampant yesterday. And in addition to the phony news releases and crank phone calls, corporations continued a recent trend of jumping on the hoax bandwagon.

Among yesterday's corporate ruses was Google 's debut of 'Gmail Custom Time,' a service that enables users to send e-mail messages with time stamps from the past. The key technology, according to the search engine giant's Web site, is the 'e-flux capacitor,' a reference to the gizmo that powered the time-traveling DeLorean in the 1985 science fiction comedy film Back to the Future. Read more

Is denying the deal a solution? Critics contend that world-beating technology, partly financed with taxpayers' money, would slip from Canada's grasp and that both jobs and sovereignty are at stake. via Globeinvestor.com

For the 20th consecutive year, the Embedded Systems Conference will be educating embedded developers. via DesignLines

“The samples that Stardust returned to Earth are helping rewrite the very history of our solar system”

While their spacecraft's journeys may have taken it more than halfway to Jupiter, members of the Stardust team have lately been doing some roaming of their own. via North Texas e-News

LAST week, NASA announced that it was planning to shut down one of JPL's two robotic rovers which is currently exploring the planet Mars, and it will significantly limit the activities of the second Mars rover. via Whittier Daily News

Just 100 of Seiko's Spring Drive Spacewalk watches, space-proof wristwatches being developed with a little help from the Russian Federal Space Agency, are expected to be made. via Gizmonews

“They don't need hardly any attention”

Thanks to outer space, Arietta Varner's African violets produce half-dollar-sized blooms nearly year-round and need little care.

Her two plants come from a strain of flowers that were grown from seeds that spent about six years in space in the 1980s. The seeds were exposed to radiation, which caused certain genetic mutations.

Guests to the Varner home are drawn to the pair of potted plants by the living room window.

'They can't believe the size of the blooms,' said her husband, Ron Varner. 'Some of them are as big as half a dollar. That's almost double the size of a normal African violet.' Read more

“When two stars orbit each other very closely, they share material, and the evolution of one affects the other”

Two recently discovered star systems share one characteristic: two stars that orbit each other so closely they share material, which makes them look like peanuts in space. via People's Daily

“It was a super rewarding mission, exciting from the start to the ending.”

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. space shuttle Endeavour returned to Earth on Wednesday, capping a milestone flight that brought Japan fully into the International Space Station partnership with the delivery of the first part of its research laboratory.

Clouds at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida prompted NASA to bypass Endeavour's first landing opportunity and nearly the second, but conditions stabilized and the wheels touched down at 8:39 p.m. EDT, ending NASA's 122nd shuttle mission in darkness, just as it began 16 days ago. Read more

“Bipartisan members of the Democratically controlled Congress should recognize the space program's vital role in America's technological preeminence and support increased NASA funding - not continuing cuts that are knee-capping the agency.”

April 3, 2008 at 6:40 am Filed under Other , NASA While Rep. Dave Weldon is using this week's release of a report predicting thousands of job losses at the Kennedy Space Center when the shuttle is retired as ... via Space Politics

By taking advantage of the surprising physics of magnetic flux pinning, spacecraft components could hover a fraction of an inch to several feet apart without electrical power. via Space Ref

“A flare typically divides its energy between directly heating the solar atmosphere and accelerating particles”

An image of the solar flare taken using the X-Ray Telescope onboard Hinode on June 7, 2007. via PhysOrg Weblog

“Cartosat-2A will have a panchromatic camera designed to provide imagery with one metre spatial resolution and a swathe of 9.6km to spot objects measuring the same size”

BANGALORE, INDIA: Indian Space Research Organisation will launch its advanced remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2A this month-end. The date is tentatively fixed for April 28 and the exact schedule will be ... via CIOL