STS-127 Landing (Endeavour)
Current Status (1st opportunity): Go
Deorbit Burn: 09:42 am EDT
Landing Time: Saturday, 10:48 am EDT
Primary Landing Site: KSC
Second Attempt if necessary: 12:22 EDT @ KSC

NASA TV Stills reload page to refresh image Webcam Image courtesy: NASA/Kennedy Space Center

NOAA’s Forecast:

Scattered showers and thunderstorms after noon. Partly cloudy, with a high near 87. South southeast wind between 5 and 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 40%. – so the earlier the better.

To keep current with the news about the landing, I recommend you go to NASA-TV.

Image Credits: NASA / NOAA

Jagged shadows from Daphnis on the Saturn's A-ring. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The teeny-tiny Saturn moon Daphnis makes jagged shadows as it disturbs the particles of the A-ring of Saturn. Kind of surprising a body that small can exert enough gravitational force on the nearby particles to move them, but indeed it can. We get to see these sights thanks to the Sun – Saturn angle being nearly flat; if you look at Saturn though a telescope right now you won’t see what you think of as the “classic Saturn”, in fact the rings are nearly invisible to us because they are almost edge on.

The Cassini Press release:

Jagged looking shadows stretch away from vertical structures of ring material created by the moon Daphnis in this image taken as Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox.

Daphnis (8 kilometers, or 5 miles across) is a bright dot casting a thin shadow just to the left of the center of the image. The moon has an inclined orbit, and its gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the particles of the A ring forming the Keeler Gap’s edge and sculpting the edge into waves having both horizontal (radial) and out-of-plane components. See Wave Shadows in Motion to learn more and to see a movie of this process.

The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun’s angle to the ringplane and causes out-of-plane structures to cast long shadows across the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn’s equinox, which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. To learn more about this special time and to see movies of moons’ shadows moving across the rings, see Moon Shadow in Motion and Weaving a Shadow.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 43 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 26, 2009. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 823,000 kilometers (511,000 miles) from Daphnis and at a Sun-Daphnis-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 53 degrees. Image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel.

The ISS from the Endeavour yesterday after undocking. Credit: NASA TV

The shuttle has undocked from the International Space Station.  Where did the time go?  The “goings on” around here has kept me on edge and the past couple of weeks have just evaporated.  Lots of bad stuff, the passing of my beloved Phoenix, mechanical troubles at work, including a fire have cast a dark shadow.  There are some very good things going on too, I’m not going to divulge what they are just now.  Oh you can be sure I will, if things work out there will be some very big news coming out after a bit.  I will be doing a lot of running around, this time hopefully for a good ending.

You might have noticed in the sidebar an email address for Marian.  She will be helping out around here and I welcome her whole heartedly.  YAY Marian!!

The separation occurred yesterday at 13:26 EDT and did a fly-around to check for any damage that might have occurred while docked (by micrometeoroids or space junk).  The shuttle was previously given the all clear to land so the fly around is a “just incase” kind of thing.

Currently the shuttle is preparing to do an engine burn to slow its speed slightly – about 10.3 feet per second or 7 miles per hour.  Seven miles per hour doesn’t seem like much, it is enough to change the orbit enough to set the shuttle up for the Friday landing.  Well gee, the 10 second burn is over.

The image above is the ISS from the Shuttle after the separation, look at the solar arrays on the right you can see the shadow of the shuttle.

I have a special post today! Special because this is a guest post from Rod Pyle, author of Missions to the Moon (Sterling, July 2009) – THANKS ROD!

By the way, if any of you got the book: MARS 3-D, a really fun book with 3-D images of Mars you can look at with a built in viewer; you will be happy to know there is a new one out called MOON 3-D.  I haven’t had the chance to pick this up yet but it is number one on my list – put it on yours.

Take it away Rod:

The planet Mars wails its siren song across the wastes of space as loudly today as it has since the first dreams of voyaging there. The question is: can we still hear it?

While traveling to Mars has been in the minds of humans since at least the mid-1800’s, it was not until after WWII that people because serious about the idea.  By the time the Apollo project was winding down, there were extensive plans to use Apollo-era hardware to make the trip.

But the realities of shifting political agendas and shrinking scientific and engineering budgets caught up with space exploration. In the end, the US was lucky to have the low-budget compromise called the Space Shuttle. The later International Space Station was trimmed-down frosting on the thin cake. So it may seem odd, after the dull but quietly competent accomplishments of these programs and whilst in the midst of the worse economic climate since the Great Depression, to be planning a return to Mars.

But consider the facts. Money for space travel is not shoveled into a capsule and shot into the dark skies above. Space funding- all of it- is spent here, on Earth, and for NASA overwhelmingly in the United States. In fact, other than weapons, space exploration may be the only major national program with such an internally advantageous result.

NASA’s adventures have always honed the best of the American edge. Higher education, graduating legions of engineers, physicists, and other scientific practitioners has always benefitted from these programs. Aerospace has traditionally found at least a partial home in space efforts, and one of the few in which it can universally help mankind as opposed to contributing to his destruction.

And the large NASA programs have benefitted other, less obvious segments of humanity. The media has long found a rich lode of drama to mine within the Mercury, Gemini and especially Apollo programs. No less a personality than Tom Hanks, the James Stewart of his time, was dramatically influenced and even given meaning by the grand sweep of Apollo.

Then of course there are the technological spinoffs: digital computers, heat-resistant materials, medical treatments, environmentally beneficial techniques across industry; these and more are a direct result of the years and dollars that equated with the race to the moon.

And so when we ask ourselves: should we return to the moon? Send people to Mars? Visit the asteroids, or even simply maintain an orbital presence; we are echoing the rhetorical question perhaps best put forth by JFK himself… “Why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon…” And Mars, and beyond. Not because it is easy but because, as we have found time and again, it is indeed hard. And that has always brought out the best in the American spirit.

Dione's fractured surface. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The Cassini spacecraft recently took this image of the trailing hemisphere of the Saturn moon Dione.

The bright area is the fractured icy surface of the moon.  Dione is 698 miles (1123 km) across.  Cassini was 808,000 miles (1.3 million km) and the image scale is 5 miles per pixel.

Check out the full press release at NASA.

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