Kentucky Space

Personal Spaceflight: Spaceport update

Personal SpaceFlight runs down news on three spaceport projects underway, one in Sweden, the other two in the United States. If your interests run to new developments in the burgeoning private space industry, the blog is a consistent source of good information. I'd recommend taking the feed.

Hubble main camera inoperable

NewScientist: Hubble's main telescope may be permanently down.

ISS, Shuttle in Solar Transit

Author and journalist Bruno Giussani, who writes about business, technology and culture at his web log, Lunch over IP, suggested these terrific images by Thierry Legault in response to the KySat "favorite space images" post. Thanks Bruno!

Apollo documentary honored

Perhaps this is a bit off topic, but the Apollo program documentary Shadow of the Moon was honored at the Sundance Film Festival.

KySat 2 accepting applications

KentuckySat (KySat) announced today that it is now accepting applications for KySat 2. This mission has a projected launch window of late 2008 to early 2009. It is expected that 10-12 students will be selected for the KySat 2 Team. Other individuals including select high school students will have the opportunity to provide critical support (pre-flight testing, embedded systems, payload design, space physics, public communications, etc) to this and other missions through The Mission Support Team.

The deadline for applications is Friday, February 23, 2007. Complete information, including application materials, is available at http://kysat.com.

Mars' atmosphere hidden?

Space.com reports that Mars' missing atmosphere may just be hidden.

Combining two years of  observations by the European Space Agency’s Mars  Express spacecraft, researchers determined that Mars is currently losing only about 20  grams of air per second into space.

Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe. (A bar is a unit for measuring pressure; Earth’s atmospheric pressure is about 1 bar.)

Reason on "NewSpace"

Found via the web log Personal Spaceflight, Reason magazine has published an interesting article on the burgeoning private space industry. The programs largely limit themselves to a "few minutes of floating," but it's a start.

Molecular wheel turned on axle

In an achievement for nano-mechanics, material scientists have for the first time been able to turn a molecular wheel about an axle. Scientists at the Centre for Material Development and Structural Studies in Toulouse, France, carried off the feat. Results appeared in the January 21 edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Recreating "when mass appeared"

Bruno Giussani, who writes quite a bit about business and innovation, particularly in Europe, recounts a talk he heard at the Digital Life Design conference in Germany on the significance of the search for the Higgs boson.

Dark energy a vacuum?

SpaceDaily: is dark energy a vacuum? New evidence shows that Einstein's "cosmological constant" is the best explanation for the continued expansion of the universe.