The shuttle Endeavour is sitting on the pad and has gotten the GO for launch from NASA.

If you think that there hasn’t been a very long time since STS-122 ended when Discovery landed and now we are getting ready to launch another shuttle, you’d be right. The shuttle Endeavour was actually on the pad when Discovery landed.

The targeted date for Endeavour’s launch and the start of mission STS-123, is March 11 at 02:28 am EST. This particular mission is going to be 16 days, a very long flight, and it will include five space walks.

The last flight, sent up the Columbus laboratory and this one will be taking the first segment of a Japanese laboratory complex called Kibo, plus a new Canadian robotics system to complement the station’s robot arm.

Visit the NASA site by clicking here.

The excellent image at the top of the post is credited to NASA and Amanda Diller. I made it into a desktop for myself and you can have it by clicking your screen size below.

I am very pleased to have a guest posting here today. Meet Margaret Lazarus Dean the author of “The Time It Takes To Fall”.

The book is a wonderful story about the life of a preteen girl whose life is inextricably woven around NASA and the shuttle program. Interestingly, time in the book is marked by shuttle missions leading up to the Challenger tragedy. This book is very good and I am happy to recommend it.

You can buy it here: The Time It Takes to Fall: A Novel, or look for it in your local bookstore.

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Greetings Ms. Dean. First off, thank you for taking the time to join us.

Thanks for having me! I love your blog.

Was there a particular inspiration for this story?

There were a few different elements that combined to create the story. The earliest one was spending way too much time in the Air and Space Museum as a child. I learned a great deal about spaceflight and saw The Dream Is Alive way too many times. Those images and ideas just kind of worked themselves into my imagination. Then, as a thirteen-year-old, I experienced the Challenger disaster as so many kids my age did, watching it on TV in a classroom. It made a big impression on me, though nothing like what Dolores experienced.
Later, as an adult, I came across a website where people posted their memories of the Challenger disaster, and I was fascinated by the range of experiences people had to share. One of them jumped out at me because the writer, who was the same age as me, described watching the explosion on TV in a classroom just as I had. But once the kids in her class realized that something had gone wrong, they ran outside to see the smoke trails in the sky. That made me think about what it would be like to live near Cape Canaveral and to experience the disaster up close, especially when so many of those kids would have parents who worked for NASA—and that was when the story started to come together.

I noted while the characters were fictitious, the facts about NASA and the shuttle program including the findings from the Challenger tragedy were accurate. How difficult was it to gather all the facts?

I did a lot of different types of research for the book. The most useful information came from several visits to central Florida, including a space shuttle launch. I didn’t grow up in Florida and didn’t know much about it, so I had a lot to learn in order to make that setting feel accurate.
The hardest research I had to do was taking an actual undergraduate Physics class just for the book. Dolores knows a lot about physics, and it figures heavily in the story, so I found myself having to fill that gap in my education. Luckily, I didn’t take it for credit so I don’t know what grade I would have earned.
I also did a lot of reading about Challenger, the design of the space shuttle, the internal workings at NASA, and the history of spaceflight. I secretly enjoyed this part of the project, because it’s more fun to read a book than it is to struggle with writing a chapter that isn’t working! I really enjoyed becoming an expert in this part of NASA history so that my character could include that knowledge seamlessly.

Did you share any of the same interests with Delores when you were her age?

I really liked math, as Dolores does, but I never had the goal of being an astronaut, and I certainly was never talented enough at science to be placed into an accelerated program as she is. I guess I did share with her the desire to do something exceptional with my life, but I think I knew even then that I was more likely to do that as a writer than as a scientist.

Do you have any aspirations of possibly going into space yourself someday?

I’ve always joked that when NASA starts a novelist-in-space program they’ll have to let me go first. (There actually were plans to send journalists, poets and writers into space after the Teacher in Space program got so much attention—those plans were put aside for obvious reasons after Challenger.) If I ever had the chance, it would be hard to turn down. Yet I’m kind of a chicken about taking physical risks, and after having written the Epilogue to my book, in which Dolores imagines the Challenger launch and the last moments of the crew, I’m not sure I’d have the courage to strap in.

I don’t want to take up any more of your time so I will thank you again for posting and writing an excellent story.

Thank you so much for inviting me—it’s an honor!

When a reader goes around wagging their finger at the main character in between reads you know it is good – that’s exactly what I found myself doing. I wish you much success!

Credit: NASA/CXC/GSFC/F.P.Gavriil et al.

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A Chandra press release:

This deep Chandra X-ray Observatory image shows the supernova remnant Kes 75, located almost 20,000 light years away. The explosion of a massive star created the supernova remnant, along with a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star.

The low energy X-rays are colored red in this image and the high energy X-rays are colored blue. The pulsar is the bright spot near the center of the image. The rapid rotation and strong magnetic field of the pulsar have generated a wind of energetic matter and antimatter particles that rush out at near the speed of light. This pulsar wind has created a large, magnetized bubble of high-energy particles called a pulsar wind nebulae, seen as the blue region surrounding the pulsar.

The magnetic field of the pulsar in Kes 75 is thought to be more powerful than most pulsars, but less powerful than magnetars, a class of neutron star with the most powerful magnetic fields known in the Universe. Scientists are seeking to understand the relationship between these two classes of object.

Using NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), Fotis Gavriil of Goddard Space Flight Center, and colleagues discovered powerful bursts of X-rays from this pulsar that are similar to bursts previously seen from magnetars. These bursts are believed to occur when the surface of the neutron star is disrupted by sudden changes in the magnetic field. These bursts were accompanied by magnetar-like changes in the rate of spin of the pulsar. Fortuitously, Chandra observed the pulsar near the time of the bursts and it was much brighter than it had been in Chandra observations obtained six years earlier. This brightening, and changes in the X-ray spectrum of the pulsar obtained with Chandra are also consistent with behavior expected for a magnetar. The behavior of this object may, therefore, fill a gap between that of pulsars and magnetars.

Harsha Sanjeev Kumar and Samar Safi-Harb of the University of Manitoba have independently used Chandra observations to argue that the pulsar in Kes 75 is revealing itself as a magnetar.

About a month ago, a bit longer, I was telling about the Ulysses spacecraft that is orbiting around the Sun and how the timing was great because of the new solar cycle going to be starting.  The Ulysses has taught us much about the way the Sun and the solar wind works.

One of the things about the Ulysses is, the orbit doesn’t always keep it near the sun, in fact the spacecraft has been to Jupiter.  It’s very cold out there and over time, nature you might say has taken its toll and actually the fuel was freezing.

In an effort, and they knew it was a long shot, engineers tried a maneuver that would heat up the fuel.  Hey they were bound to try, well it didn’t work and actually made things a little worse.  The demise of Ulysses was hastened by a couple of months.

Now before anybody jumps the gun and gets to thinking, “dumb engineers that was a bad move”, the truth is the maneuver didn’t really matter, Ulysses was on the way our anyway and lest you think this was a short mission.  Ulysses was scheduled to be a five year mission when it launched in 1990.

So after 17 years, Ulysses, one of the most successful missions you may never have heard of is coming to an end.  So my condolences and congratulations to NASA.  Check out the Ulysses website by clicking the image above.

Image Credit: NASA

Here’s Cassini’s latest image and it shows Rhea. The bright fuzzy area behind the moon Rhea is an out of focus Saturn.

Here’s the press release:

Rhea drifts in front of Saturn. The battered, icy moon is seen here near the western limb of the planet’s northern hemisphere.

This image was taken eight hours after The Rays of Rhea. The view looks toward the anti-Saturn side of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across). North is up.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 17, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of ultraviolet light centered at 338 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 576,000 kilometers (358,000 miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 12 degrees. Image scale is 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

You wouldn’t think a planet with a surface temperature of 860^oF (450^oC) could possibly have clouds let alone clouds that are capable of changing substantially, yet Venus does have clouds and they do change a lot. The clouds aren’t the mostly friendly water vapor variety we have; they are mostly (96.6%) carbon dioxide, some sulfur dioxide and a wee bit of water vapor.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has a spacecraft studying the planet called the Venus Express. The image above (Credit: ESA) is just one of a series of newly released images from the Venus Express show the haze of sulfuric acid that is produced in the presence of ultraviolet radiation. You can see more of the images and the changing clouds of Venus at this ESA page.

The main ESA Venus Express site is located here, check it out, they have much more.

Here is the caption ESA has for the image above:

This is a picture of Venus’s atmosphere, taken by the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) during Venus Express orbit number 459 on 24 July 2007. The view shows the southern hemisphere of the planet.

These Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) images show the dynamic changes in Venus’s light and dark clouds. These clouds are visible only at ultraviolet wavelengths and are remarkably changeable, altering the reflectivity of the planet by a third over periods of just a few days. While researchers believe that the bright haze is produced by sulphuric acid particles, the chemistry behind the dark regions is unknown.

Credits: ESA/ MPS/DLR/IDA