The SpaceX Dragon capsule will launch atop its Falcon 9 Rocket from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is set for 4:55 AM Eastern Time, and NASA will broadcast the launch starting at 3:30 AM. Before the Dragon capsule is allowed to dock with the ISS, several tests will be conducted. The capsule will have to demonstrate its ability to maneuver and perform a docking abort before being allowed to participate in an actual docking procedure.

Should anything delay the launch, the backup plan is to launch on May 22. This mission was previously expected to launch in February.

[via PCMag]

The explosion heard was a sonic boom of the giant meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Parts of that meteor hit the ground and have already been found by treasure seekers. However, so far only small portions of meteor have been found. Some researchers believe that there have to be large pieces out there waiting to be discovered.

“Only small pieces have been found. There have to be big pieces out there,” SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens said before the trip. “We’re just hoping to collect more meteorites for research.” The photo you see here is a group of NASA researchers heading to a NASA blimp to be used as an aerial platform to search for the meteor fragments. Meteors of this magnitude generally happen once per year around the Earth, but typically they happen in uninhabited areas. This meteor happened to plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere near populated areas and was witnessed by many people.

[via The Telegraph]

In the photo here, you can see in the red area what appears to be a jointed ship hovering near the sun. Some believe it’s a UFO refueling, while others claim it’s nothing but another artifact caused by peculiar conditions in space. Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer at the United States Naval Research Laboratory says that what some believe is a spaceship is nothing more than a collection of streaks left behind by cosmic rays as they traveled through the sensor of the satellite that took the photos.

The photo was taken by NASA’s Solar and Heliosphereic Observatory (SOHO) earlier this week. “The streaks in question are consistent with energetic particle (proton) impacts on the CCD, something which is apparent in just about every image,” Rich said. He believes the UFO is nothing more than an electric charge left in the pixels of the camera the cosmic rays penetrated. What do you think?

[via Fox News]

Naturally as with anything from NASA, the system gets its own acronym. The system is called READI. Other than just being able locate the source and strength of an earthquake more quickly so emergency workers can be dispatched, NASA is also concerned about providing advance notice of tsunamis.

The tsunamis that destroyed parts of Japan and Indonesia were caused by massive offshore earthquakes. Any major earthquake that happens along the western United States has a potential of sending tsunami across the ocean where it could cause damage. As much advance notification of an incoming tsunami as possible is needed to protect lives. It’s interesting to see or GPS system used for things you might not think about such as earthquake preparedness.

Discovery will be displayed at the National Air and Space Museum. During its final flight, the 747 circled monuments in Washington while crowds of people on the ground looked on. “I tell you, it made the tears come. I stood there for three or four seconds and just began crying,” said Patricia Rensch of Arlington, Va.

It’s really sad to think that Discovery has flown for the last time. At the same time, it’s exciting to think that if you take a trip to its new museum home, you’ll be able to see it up close and personal. The coolest thing is that for at least a short time both the Discovery and the test shuttle Enterprise will be in the same place. The Enterprise will eventually be moving to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City.

[via USA Today]

The massive solar tornado was big enough to have swallowed 100 Earths. The tornado is actually known as a solar prominence and they have been seen on the sun for decades but this was the largest ever seen. Astronomers have calculated that the storm was an astounding 124,000 miles tall. Watch the spiraling movement of this impressive solar phenomenon in the video clip below:

Rather than being caused by winds like tornadoes on Earth, the solar prominence was caused by a spiral shaped magnetic structure that rises from the sun and is attached at both ends to the surface of the sun. The solar tornado starts with a huge injection of plasma that shoots up one of those structure’s legs. The plasma is guided along the helical shape of the magnetic structure giving it a coherent rotation of material, in turn causing the massive solar tornado. One of the more interesting parts is that this solar tornado didn’t produce any plasma eruptions, which generally happens.

[via National Geographic]

The checklist brought $390,000 at auction, but then NASA stepped in and claimed Lovell didn’t own the checklist, and that it was NASA property. The checklist went into the vault of the auction house and still sits there until this is all sorted out. It appears that it will literally take an act of Congress to get NASA to agree to let astronauts keep the items they took home after their missions. A bill is before Congress right now that was introduced by Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, and the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas would let astronauts keep certain items.

The bill sponsors wrote a letter to congressional colleagues asking to allow the “first generation of astronauts to retain spaceflight artifacts that have been in their possession… in many cases for more than 40 years.” In plain terms that sounds like NASA GTFO to me. The only thing the bill wouldn’t allow astronauts to keep are moon rocks.

[via PhysOrg]

The photo looks a bit like a fire or white worm of some sort, but it’s actually a picture of a dust devil raging on the surface of the red planet. The raging winds pushed a column of dust more than half a mile in the atmosphere. Martian dust devils are very similar to those on Earth and are powered by spinning columns of air.

The difference between a tornado and a dust devil comes in when they form. A dust devil forms on a clear day and is caused by the sun hitting the ground. Tornadoes, on the other hand occur during storms when winds are high. This Martian dust devil measured more than half a mile high, and has a massive shadow as you can see from the image. I wonder how wide its path was.

[NASA via Clarksville Online]

The new game will have players flicking birds around zero gravity and apparently being forced to deal with gravity wells created by nearby planets. The space-bound quest to destroy the pigs should be very interesting. ISS astronaut and flight engineer Don Petit has helped to tease the new game in this video where he talks about physics while in space. The video was shot aboard the ISS and has Petit using toy Angry Bird to demonstrate trajectories in low gravity situations. Watch the video below to see what Rovio and NASA have been up to. If you just want to get to the gameplay demo, skip to 3:03.

Angry Birds Space will be released on March 22, so you don’t have long to wait before you can play with birds, pigs and gravity for yourself.

Volunteers will use both prepackaged food just as astronauts today eat, and meals that astronauts would cook themselves aboard the ship. I would have to think that cooking your own meals would be superior to eating prepackaged food. The researchers are hoping to get recipes and cooking tips be used on potential future missions and to create a database of recipes.

The simulated volunteer mission would last four months. During that time, the volunteers will get to wear space suits too, which is a bonus in my book. They’ll also get to spend two weeks isolated only with their “crew” in a simulated Martian habitat.

If you want to be part of the mission the deadline to apply is February 29th, and you can apply here.

[via Clickorlando]

The video was released this week but was actually filmed back in January. It begins in an impact basin known as Mare Orientale. That impact basin is massive at 560 miles wide. To capture the footage, NASA used one of the Grail spacecraft and the camera it’s equipped with called the MoonKAM.

The coolest thing about that camera is that NASA will allow students on earth to snap pictures the lunar surface as part of a project for education. MoonKAM is the first camera ever sent on a NASA probe that is completely dedicated to educational use. Camera control will be given to Middle School students starting in March.

You can check out the video above ore on the official NASA page here.

Right now the single biggest space hazard in orbit are the thousands of pieces of debris left over after the Chinese conducted an anti-satellite test with a missile back in 2007. Early Sunday morning this past weekend, mission controllers in Russia had to make a change in the orbital altitude of the ISS to avoid a chunk of that Chinese space debris that was coming perilously close to the ISS.

Mission controllers fired up the engines on the Russian Zvezda service module and over 64 seconds raised the orbit of the ISS by 1.7 km. The ISS is now orbiting at an altitude of 391.6 km above the surface of the Earth. The increased orbital distance was enough to get the ISS away from the chunk of space debris. It seems like we need to start coming up with a good plan to clean up all the junk orbiting the Earth.

[via SpaceDaily]

According to the Russian, the object is an organism with the body of a scorpion or a crab, a disc shape and a back flap that changed position from one shot to the next the probe took. Life on Venus is hard for most people to imagine, since the surface of the planet can reach temps of 464°C, and the gravity is nine times that of Earth.

A scientist that works with the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University doesn’t believe the Russian is seeing what he thinks. According to Jonathon Hill, who processes images NASA takes of Mars, what Prof. Ksanfomaliti sees is a piece of mechanical equipment which broke off on landing. He also thinks that the reason it looks like it changed positions is that the images were taken by two different cameras on the craft.

Hill also says that the same object shows up in photos taken by another probe called Venera 14 that landed nearby. Venera 14 and Venera 13 are identical, and likely both dropped the same bit of debris on the ground. What do you think from the blurry images here? I can certainly see something you might think are legs, but the mechanical equipment theory seems much more logical.

[via Telegraph]

STEREO-B is one of a pair of spacecraft near the sun that watch the inner solar system and provide images and video. NASA has decided to step up and debunk the rumor on the cover-up and existence of this particular UFO. According to space agency, in the video you can see the bright planet Venus come into view and the “UFO” moves along with Venus.

The triangular shaped “UFO” is nothing but reflected light from inside the telescope on the spacecraft. NASA says that this sort of triangular pattern is not uncommon and that sometimes the reflections manifest as circles too. In other words, calm down UFO nuts. NASA said, “The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image,” the scientists wrote. “At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the [telescopic camera's] field-of-view from the lower left.”

“This is not a coincidence. The strange-looking geometrical ‘object’ is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics. This effect has been seen many times before.”

[via CSMonitor]

The ISS crew is excited because this isn’t only a visit by a new ship; the Dragon will also be bringing supplies like food, clothing, and other supplies for the crew. The Dragon flight is being funded in part by the NASA Commercial Orbiter Transportation Services (COTS). The Dragon is an automated ship and one of the most important things about Dragon’s arrival is that it will allow items from the ISS to return to Earth.

The Dragon craft will allow the return of “significant” payloads to Earth. That means broken equipment can be sent home and repaired and samples can be returned to Earth. The first visit by the Dragon ship will be unmanned, but it was designed to carry people as well.

SpaceX expects to launch the Dragon from Cape Canaveral using its Falcon 9 booster on February 7th.

[via space.com]

Lovell apparently signed an affidavit that asserted he owned the title to the ring-bound checklist. However, NASA says that there is no indication that Lovell was ever assigned the title to the document. NASA’s legal eagle noted that only NASA has the right to sell NASA property.

The auction firm, Heritage Auctions, is keeping the document in its vault and has suspended the sale until the legal wrangling is over. Lovell had sold the checklist at the auction house for $380,000. Apollo 13 was the moon mission that had a tank explosion 200,000 miles from Earth, which forced the crew to return home. NASA is also disputing the legal right to several other space items Heritage Auctions has sold in the past.

[via ABCNews]

The Lovejoy comet was on a path that many in the scientific community thought would mean the end of the comet. The comet was headed on a journey that would take it right through the corona of the sun. The scientists expected the comet to be vaporized. So scientists were shocked when the comet actually barreled through the corona and zipped right back into space.

Lovejoy was watched by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory as it headed toward the sun. The SDO followed the path of the comet, expecting nothing but a dust trial to survive, but it appears to have emerged from the other side. It lost a significant amount of its mass, but part of the comet still made it through. Given the fact that the corona of the sun is estimated to reach a temperature of nearly 2 million degrees Farehnheit, that’s no small feat.

Prior to the fly-by, Lovejoy had a core that was 660-feet wide and is in a class of comets called “Kreutz sungrazers” because they orbit so close to the sun.

[via Space.com]

The crossbow is six feet long and made from a pair of truck carriage springs. The string that holds the giant “arrow” to the crossbow is a thick piece of cable. I have a hard time believing that cable will withstand the forces of shooting into a comet moving 150,000 mph, but stranger things have happened.

The crossbow can launch its ammunition with 1000 pounds of force, and one engineer says if the crossbow were aimed straight up, it would likely shoot a mile into the air. A prototype harpoon even penetrated a 250 liter drum of dirt in testing, and the actual space harpoon will be fired by an explosive cannon, not just a mechanical crossbow like their test model, so it’s likely to be even more powerful and precise. Where was this technology when Captain Ahab was around?

[via Wired]

The checklist calculations that commander James Lovell used to work out the spacecraft’s position and the angle to entry back into Earth’s atmosphere were hand written on this chart. One miscalculation and the astronauts would have been killed, so the data on this chart was instrumental in saving the astronauts’ lives.

This authentic original checklist recently grabbed over $380,000 (USD) at auction, making it the most expensive moon mission era item to never have landed on the moon.

[via The Australian]

Armstrong apparently denied ever selling or giving space rock to anyone. The piece of rock in question is apparently inside a dome made of acrylic meant to be a paperweight and has been authenticated as real. NASA maintains that any moon rocks were brought back from Apollo missions and therefore are property of the government. Davis contacted someone at NASA to ask for help selling the rock to raise money for a sick child.

She is said to have acknowledged that the rock couldn’t be sold legitimately and hinted at selling it on the black market. When Davis went to a restaurant, in southern California to compete the sale, NASA’s inspector general and law enforcement swooped in and seized the rock and scared Davis so badly she apparently lost control of her bladder. Davis says the rock is her property and that she ended up with bruises on her body from being held by the police. I am sure a lawsuit in the case is coming soon. Davis was not arrested, but wasn’t allowed to keep the rock either.

[via CSMonitor]