T-524 (hours) and counting

Atlantis rolled up to the pad yesterday for what will be its last mission. This is the 39th time Atlantis has rolled onto the pad, though only its 32nd launch (technical issues and weather accounted for the others.) Atlantis is the only shuttle to have also had a "half roll," necessitated when a tropical storm weakened and the shuttle, which was rolling off the launch pad, got a "never mind" from NASA and rolled back on. Atlantis is the fourth of NASA's shuttles, younger than Columbia, Challenger and Discovery and older than Endeavor.

The shuttles, with their 2.5 million parts, have been called the most complex machines ever created by humans.

Atlantis's mission is to deliver a Russian-made research module to the ISS.

The crew of six is led by our man, Garrett (well, no it's not, but this blog isn't about Commander Ken Ham). Anyway, here are the guys who will make this thing go:

Ken Ham, a former Navy pilot; Dominic Antonelli, another former Navy pilot; Michael Good, an Air Force pilot; Piers Sellers, a British geophysicist; and Stephen Bowen, a Navy submariner. Then, there's ol' what's-his-name.

Among them, they have logged more time in space than I have logged at Manuel's Tavern, and, let me point out, that is no small amount of time.

Mary and I will be there, waving to Garrett, and asking plaintively, "Do you think he can see us?"

Happy Easter/Passover

and whatever day you celebrate if you are Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or whatever...

Rosebud. Not a sled.

We're used to Hubble's pretty pictures, but now our old friend has company. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE. Does NASA ever name anything something that can't be made into a nice acronym?) blasted off last December with the goal of scanning the entire sky in infrared light. It is looking for the nearest and coolest stars (which it presumably can identify by their disdain for what currently passes for rock and roll), as well as the origins of stellar and interplanetary systems and the universe's most luminous galaxies.

Today, NASA released the image above, which it is describing as a grouping of stars in the Berkeley 59 cluster, a star nursery in the constellation Cepheus, some 3,000 light years from us. In a flight of fancy not usually associated with astrophysicists, scientists are calling it a "cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars."

The rosebud-like red glow surrounding the hot, young stars is warm dust heated by the stars. Green "leafy" nebulosity is the product of heated aromatic (exactly what do they smell like?) hydrocarbons, similar to materials that can be found on Earth in barbecue pits, exhaust pipes, Congress and other places where combustion has occurred. The stars are the blue dots to the right of the rosebud.

And, just because it's my favorite galaxy (you have to be a real nerd to have a favorite galaxy), I am attaching WISE's picture of the Andromeda Galaxy.

So pretty!

These are the latest NASA photos of our home planet. True color, according to NASA. They are beautiful. And they make me think. If you don't believe in climate change, why would you chance it? If there's a possibility that all these scientists could be right, even if they aren't, why would you chance it? Say, the vast majority of scientists are wrong. It could happen. But what if there's only a 5 percent chance they're right (the latest scientific findings assert that the percentage is more like 95 percent surety that climate change is man-made), then isn't that too much of a chance to take?

We're Baaaaccccckkkk

We have been extremely negligent at maintaining this blog. I blame it on Cathy, who got pregnant and lost her way.

Actually, Cathy discovered her pregnancy shortly before she, Mary, my friend, Barbara, and I schlepped to Gila, NM, to see the Leonid Meteor Shower, which was SUPPOSED to be spectacular. It wasn't. During the three nights we were there, we probably saw 25 meteors, few of which were actually Leonids. But what the hey? The sky was astounding, pure black (new moon), with a brighter-than-I-have-ever-seen Milky Way. Also cold. It was in the 20s at night, and even with Cathy's NASA-approved blankies, champagne and other beverages, it was unbearably cold.

However, we had the Casitas de Gila (www.casitasdegila.com, (recommended highly)) host who brought out his 10-inch Orion telescope and showed us lots of stuff. Then, as we were walking back to our casita, we came upon another lovely person, an amateur astronomer who volunteered to show us other cool stuff. Plus, we got to spend time in the gorgeous NM desert. The highlight was Sirius rising, with colors changing from red to green to blue to purple and looking for all the world like those lights folks had in the 60s that changed the colors on their aluminum Christmas trees.

Back in Atlanta, I dragged everybody outside after Thanksgiving dinner at Barbara's house to see the ISS followed shortly by the shuttle -- both high in the sky and very bright. Everyone was impressed.

Recently, we had a double whammy -- the Saints won the Super Bowl and, that morning, STS-130 launched. My sisters Mary and Vicky were at the launch, and I called them from Atlanta. The NASA site, which I had up on my computer, was about 30 seconds behind the actual launch, which I could hear on Vicky's cell phone. So I looked up off my deck, and, damn, there it was. Beautiful.

I have booked a flight to Melbourne to be with Mary when STS-132 launches. That'd be the one with Garrett aboard. Mary thinks we have scared Garrett, who surely assumes we are all STALKERS. Which, I assure you, we are not. Or at least, most of us are not.

Anyway, Cathy's pregnancy is proceeding well. We already know that it's a boy (unusual in our family) and that he will be named "Drew" for his grandpa who died last April and is a big reason we are all space nuts. Drew will be born sometime in late April, and Cathy will post a photo of him (Cathy?) in his new NASA onesie.

Meanwhile, please check out the Traveler's Guide to the Planets on NatGeo. It's amazing.

Duck!

Spaceweather.com, which, if you don’t visit it often, you really should, has a regular listing of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), which are defined as “space rocks larger than approximately 100 meters that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 astronomical units.” (An AU is the mean distance between the sun and the Earth, and we all know that that is – say it with me, everybody – 92.something million miles.)

Spaceweather makes the comforting statement that none of the PHAs astronomers are following is in danger of hitting us, but the uncomforting qualifier is that astronomers are “finding new ones all the time.”

On October 8, one snuck up on them, blasting through the sky in Indonesia and freaking out the local population who thought, naturally, EARTHQUAKE! According to NASA’s Near Earth Object Program (which is missing a hyphen, but what can you do?), the explosion caused by the 10-meter asteroid “triggered infrasound sensors of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization more than 10,000 kilometers away.”

Not to worry, though. NASA says asteroids smaller than 25 meters can’t really do much damage, unless, of course, they fall on your car. And asteroids the size of the Indonesia one only hit Earth every 2-12 years (seems like a remarkably large gap there). And I am sure I will have forgotten all this by 2011.

How annoying.

You just know Saturn just updated its Facebook status to: "OMG!OMG!OMG! I GOT A NEW RING AND IT IS SOOOOOOOOOOOO BEAUTIFUL AND AMAZING!!!!!!!!" <3 <3 <3

Adler after dark.

Man, I wish my sisters lived closer, because we would DOMINATE this trivia game.

Clearly, happy people were on Mercury

On September 29, MESSENGER spacecraft passed by Mercury for the third time, flying 141.7 miles above the planet’s rocky surface for a final gravity assist that will enable it to enter orbit above Mercury in 2011. During the encounter, the MESSENGER cameras caught a portion of Mercury's never-before-seen surface . With more than 90 percent of the planet’s surface already imaged, MESSENGER’s science team had drafted an ambitious observation campaign designed to tease out additional details from features uncovered during the first two flybys.

Somebody had to work hard to get this acronym: MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry and Ranging. Messenger delivered many nice photos of the surface of the planet, but I like this one the best.

And way up there, He'll hear our prayer and showwwww us where..

THERE'S WATER!
ON THE FREAKIN' MOON, Y'ALL!