Hasta La Gadget!

At 4:50 PM ET, the space shuttle Discovery will lift off. Finally. That is, if everything goes plan–an important caveat, given the fact that the launch has been repeatedly delayed since November 5th, thanks to poor weather conditions, electric problems, and a number of leaks found in the shuttle’s fuel tank.

Fueling for the launch began today at 7:25 ET. The process takes three hours to complete.

The launch marks the final mission for the shuttle after 27 years. The mission will last eleven days, during which the crew will help stock the International Space Station with supplies and a new robot helper named Robonaut 2.

On February 14 NASA’s Stardust spacecraft had a close encounter with the comet Temple 1. For the first time in history, we got to visit a comet two times—a strange opportunity that allowed scientist to see how these space objects change. More »

Well, not so much the bears themselves–something tells me that letting a grizzly loose on a space station might not be particularly beneficial to the mission. Rather, the key here is bear hibernation, which scientists believe could be a key to enabling travel into deep space.

We measured the bears’ metabolism by continuously measuring the oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations of the air entering and leaving the den. The transmitters inside each bear told us that the bear’s body temperature was not stable, but varied over the winter in slow cycles each lasting several days

Tøien believes that the discovery could make it possible to induce hibernation in people, thus making it possible to survive the long periods required for deep space travel.

Is there a giant planet four times the size of Jupiter hanging out at the edge of our solar system? The consensus from scientists is a definitive “maybe.”  Two researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette believe that there’s a gas giant lurking in our solar system, a theory they base on the strange pattern of comets in the area.

The phantom planet has been nicknamed Tyche, after a Greek goddess, and it’s been the source of some major controversy–which is to say that a lot of fellow scientists aren’t really buying the theories about a giant ninth planet, at least not with the current evidence available.

Over at Discover Magazine, Phil Plait had this to say, 

I read their papers, and thought the data were interesting but unconvincing. The sample size was too small. A bigger study was done, but again the effects weren’t quite enough to rise to the level of breakthrough.

There you have it, a big, fat scientific “maybe.”

“A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His spaceship, Columbia, took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the Moon. It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth and the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow.”

Those are the words Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong recited for an entranced public as his ship returned from its mission to the moon. Armstrong was right to mention Verne’s 1865 sci-fi classic. There are, in fact, some oddly prescient details in From the Earth to the Moon–even for an author so forward thinking as Verne.

Armstrong points out the similarities between its name and the name of the Apollo 11’s command module–that part’s actually only part right. The name of the space cannon used to launch the ship was the Columbiad, named for a real U.S. cannon that was used heavily in the war of 1812.

Verne estimated that the mission would have cost his day’s equivalent to $12.1 billion. Surprisingly spot on–the Apollo program up through Apollo 8 (the first manned vehicle to circumnavigate the moon) cost $14.4 billion. As with the book, that mission also a crew of three astronauts. Verne’s were named Ardan, Barbicane, and Nicholl–Apollo 8’s were Anders, Borman and Lovell.

The launch occurred 132 miles from the site of Verne’s prediction. As the above shot illustrates, the two ships also shared a number of physical properties.