NASA Space Shuttle Program

April 24th, 2013, 11:34 PM

I kinda wish they would first put all the money into the biggest baddest space telescope that will let us see everything and then spend money on the rest of it. Man on Mars, woo hoo. I wanna see me some freakin aliens already.

July 6th, 2013, 02:56 PM

For lack of a better thread:

Mysterious radio bursts come from outside our galaxy | Ars Technica

Mike

July 6th, 2013, 02:58 PM

Quoting

On June 14, SpaceX�s Grasshopper flew 325 m (1066 feet)�higher than Manhattan�s Chrysler Building�before smoothly landing back on the pad. For the first time in this test, Grasshopper made use of its full navigation sensor suite with the F9-R closed loop control flight algorithms to accomplish a precision landing. Most rockets are equipped with sensors to determine position, but these sensors are generally not accurate enough to accomplish the type of precision landing necessary with Grasshopper.

Mike

July 14th, 2013, 04:14 AM

I know a rocket scientist.

No really, my wife went to law school with his wife. He works at NASA Goddard, outside of Washington, DC and once (during the 90's) he gave me a tour. LOTSA cool hardware.

He was working on a project called The Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer

The whole point was to exactly time when X rays were coming in, and from that determine physical properties of spinning celestial objects.

From Wikipedia: "Observations from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer have been used as evidence for the existence of the frame-dragging effect predicted by the theory of general relativity. RXTE results have, as of late 2007, been used in more than 1400 scientific papers."

That's all cool, but what I liked was that during the tour the thing was still being built, so I got to to "kick the tires." If it had optics I would have had to don a clean suit, or more likely not allowed near it, but with an X ray satellite it was more like a very expensive car garage.

I think it's pretty neat that I got to touch something that is now in orbit over our heads. Well, for a while. When I looked at Wikipedia to get the info above, I saw that it ceased operations in 2012, and is expected to re-enter the earths atmosphere "between 2014 and 2023." I guess everything ends someday...