Hasta La Gadget!

The space shuttle Discovery’s final launch has been delayed for a couple of weeks now, thanks to numerous delays due to electrical problems, weather, and mostly recently, gas leaks. The mission, which was initially scheduled to begin on November 1st, is now planned for December 3rd at 2:52 ET.

The most recent, nearly month-long delay is due to a hydrogen leak discovered on the ship’s external gas tank. NASA has been busy replacing a seal on the tank and reinforcing its metal ribs.

When the shuttle final takes off, its final mission is set to last 11 days. It will feature six astronauts, two space walks, and one humanoid space robot.

It reads like the beginnings of a bad horror movie–after seven
years in space, a Japanese probe has brought back asteroid dust. It’s the first
time that the material has been brought to earth. Scientists at Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency (JAXA) are hoping to discover information about the
formation of the solar system with the material.

“There is so much that humans don’t know, such as how
the Mo on was formed,” a JAXA spokesman told ABC News. “But research,
not just into these particles but into other findings, could provide us with
hints on how the solar system and the planets were formed.”

The surfaces of asteroids, scientists believe, have
undergone few changes that the surface of the earth, which has been shaped by
phenomena like atmosphere and water.

The particles are made up of minerals like olivine, plagioclases,
and pyroxene and are mostly smaller than 1/100th of a millimeter.

Space. It’s an expansive cold place full of giant scary
things–huge terrifying object like these space bubbles. There are two of them,
jutting out on either side of the Milky Galaxy, north and south. The two
objects, taken together, measure 50,000 light years.

The giant space bubbles weren’t discovered until recently,
when astronomer Doug Finkbeiner happened upon them at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, thanks to NASA’s Fermi
Gamma-Ray Telescope.

So, what are they? Who knows? Not  Finkbeiner. He told the press, “We don’t fully
understand their nature or origin.” We do know that they’re big, however–they take
up roughly half of the visible sky. Apparently we’ve haven’t seen them until
now, thanks to all of the gamma radiation in the sky. 

You’re probably familiar with supersonic planes like the SR-71 Blackbird pictured above, which managed to fly at over three times the speed of sound, but imagine this: NASA set aside $15 million to develop a hypersonic plane that could exit our atmosphere at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 20. The US space agency’s not expecting to build it quite that cheaply, of course, and it’s not holding out hope for a contractor to build the entire plane just yet — the organization intends to fund some sixteen smaller science and engineering projects (ranging from “how to build a Mach 8+ engine” to “predicting hypersonic fluid dynamics”) and letting would-be government contractors pick and choose. Know how to quantify baseline turbulent aeroheating uncertainty in a hypersonic environment? You’ve got until November 23rd to get your proposal in.

Update: As some have pointed out in comments, hypersonic flight isn’t unprecedented — NASA spent eighteen years developing and testing the X-15 space plane starting in 1951, which reached Mach 6.7 using a rocket engine.

[Thanks, Gadi]

NASA budgets $15 million for hypersonic flight originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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International Space Station marks ten years of continuous habitation originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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