50 years ago today John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.  A few are confused on this point thinking Glenn was the first American in space, that distinction belongs to Alan Shepard who flew the first (sub-orbital) spaceflight.  Incidentally, Shepard was the only Mercury Astronaut to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 mission.  Anyway, the confusion might arise because of the name of the capsule Glenn flew: Freedom 7.  These two names are enough alike, well you get the idea.

The Mercury program used two different rockets to put the capsules into space: the Redstone and the Atlas. The program suffered some early failures: the first launch of a Mercury capsule on an Atlas rocket exploded and the first Redstone flight only achieved an altitude of about four inches. To be sure the program was safe for humans, the first beings to fly in the Mercury capsules were not men but a rhesus monkey named Sam and two chimps named Ham and Enos. Sam flew a “Little Joe” rocket, Ham a Redstone and Sam an Atlas. Even though all the primates made it back safely, the men chosen to fly were extremely brave and all had a active role in making the rockets and spacecraft safe.

You may have noticed the names both include a “7″.  Ever wonder why?  The Mercury program was named after the fleet-footed Roman god.  Each of the manned capsules were named by the astronauts who flew them.  The number “7″ was first added by Alan Shepard because his capsule was the seventh made.  The other program astronauts followed suit to honor the first seven project astronauts named by the fledgling NASA.

Credit: NASA / Video source

Oh, man!  You have to look at this:

NASA - ISS Station crew

Here’s the text from NASA:

With hardware from the Earth-orbiting International Space Station appearing in the near foreground, a night time European panorama reveals city lights from Belgium and the Netherlands at bottom center. the British Isles partially obscured by solar array panels at left, the North Sea at left center, and Scandinavia at right center beneath the end effector of the Space Station Remote Manipulator System or Canadarm2. This image was taken by the station crew on Jan. 22, 2012.

Image Credit: NASA

Artist's concept of NASA's Voyager spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It’s pretty amazing, who would have thought after all these years we’d be getting updates on the Voyager spacecrafts?

The update below continues with the theme of power saving to stretch out the mission. The mission could extend to 2025 after which data collection and transmission will probably cease.

Actually even more amazing than the Mission time of 15 years is the mere fact we can still communicate with the Voyager. The radio signal must be incredibly weak, the transmitter only puts out 20 watts at best and the spaceship is over 17,966,400,000 km or 11,163,800,000 miles away! Radio signals take over 33 hours to go to Voyager and back!

Here’s the update from JPL (click for Voyager site):

PASADENA, Calif. — In order to reduce power consumption, mission managers have turned off a heater on part of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, dropping the temperature of its ultraviolet spectrometer instrument more than 23 degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit). It is now operating at a temperature below minus 79 degrees Celsius (minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit), the coldest temperature that the instrument has ever endured. This heater shut-off is a step in the careful management of the diminishing electrical power so that the Voyager spacecraft can continue to collect and transmit data through 2025.

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Close-up (rear) view of Astronaut White as he floats in zero gravity of space over Gulf of Mexico. White is attached to the spacecraft by a 25-ft. umbilical line and a 23-ft. tether line, both wrapped in gold tape to form one cord. In his right hand White carries a Hand-Held Self-Maneuvering Unit (HHSMU). The visor of his helmet is gold plated to protect him from the unfiltered rays of the sun. Click for larger. Image and caption: Project Gemini

First off, gee there was no post yesterday, I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake, oh well too late now.  I do have one today though and I think it’s pretty cool.

Project Gemini, the second US human spaceflight program got under way in 1964 following the Mercury program. The Gemini program was kind of a baby step on the road to putting a man on the moon. The overall goal with the Gemini was to test systems and other operations instrumental to the Apollo program.  The reality is that Gemini program provided a basis for all US space missions to follow.

The cool bit is NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University just today put the Project Gemini Online Digital Archive online.  The archive contains the first high-resolution digital scans of the original Gemini flight films, now available in several formats.  It also has Mercury mission images too. Be sure to check it out!

A volcano in the Red Sea. Click for larger. NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team.

This look at a volcanic eruption in the Red Sea in December 2011 comes to us from the Earth Observatory.

Fountains of lava reaching 90 feet (30 meters) in the air according to fisherman are helping form what could be a new island.  The before and after pictures can be seen at the NASA Earth Observatory site and in their full context as I zoomed in on the volcano.  The region is part of the Red Sea Rift, the area where the African and Arabian tectonic plates pull apart.

The image was taken by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing satellite on December 23, 2011.

SOFIA looks deep into M42. Click for larger. Image: NASA / SOFIA

SOFIA short for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, is an observatory that is mounted into the rear fuselage of a 747. The 2.5-meter (that’s about 100 inches!) reflecting telescope works in the visible, infrared and sub-millimeter ranges and flying at between 39,000 and 45,000 feet is above 99 percent of the water vapor in the atmosphere that really goobers up the infrared and sub-millimeter observations.

While it (for me) lacks the pizzazz of balloon mission it more than makes up for it with the ability to “go now”.

Want to learn more about SOFIA?  Go here.

Check out the press release below for a great description of the image, including the colors:

A new image from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) shows a complex distribution of interstellar dust and stars in the Orion nebula. Interstellar dust, composed mostly of silicon, carbon and other heavy elements astronomers refer to generically as “metals,” plus some ice and organic molecules, is part of the raw material from which new stars and planets are forming.

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