Today in pretty space pics: Comet Lovejoy, still alive and heading back out toward the far reaches of the solar system, as seen from the International Space Station. This photograph was snapped yesterday as the ISS passed over Australia by Dan Burbank, one of the station's current crew members. And needless to say, it's one of those once-in-a-lifetime shots.
It might sound a bit brazen to play around with fire in an artificially oxygenated environment, but that hasn't stopped the crew of the ISS from studying the behaviour of flame aboard the orbiting science station. Fire behaves very strangely - relative to the way it behaves on Earth, at least - in microgravity, and the Flame Extinguishment Experiment (FLEX) has conducted more than 200 tests over two years to try and understand why.
Astronauts and cosmonauts are generally chosen based on a balanced blend of desirable traits: mental acuity and psychological stability (it's isolated up there), physical fitness, physiological durability, willingness to be strapped to a massive controlled explosion and hurled into an environment that is extremely hostile toward life, etc. But it's no secret: Right Stuff or no Right Stuff, astronauts stink. There's simply no good way to stay clean in space.
The privately built Dragon space capsule's maiden flight to the International Space Station is just weeks away, but SpaceX and NASA already have big dreams for Dragon's next steps. In a presentation at NASA late last month, SpaceX and space agency officials discussed sending Dragon to Mars. A "Red Dragon" mission, as NASA officials have nicknamed it, would be a low-cost way to send an ice drill to look for signs of life at the Martian poles.
Likely prompted in no small part by last month's Progress cargo ship crash in Russia, NASA has announced a US$1.6 billion contract running through 2014 to develop complete end-to-end cargo and crew transportation between Earth and the International Space Station. In other words, NASA is getting really serious about developing commercial space taxis that can do what the shuttle no longer can: get people and supplies to and from the space station without relying solely on Russian technology.
Following the crash of a Russian cargo spacecraft a few days ago, the country has postponed its next mission to the International Space Station, originally scheduled for September 22nd. Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, hopes to complete that mission by late October or early November--but if it gets delayed again, the ISS may be left unmanned for the first time in over a decade.
Our favorite Twitter ‘bot--no, like an actual robot that tweets--is out of the box and live-tweeting its new life on the International Space Station. Robonaut 2 was actually unboxed several months ago (it was delivered by the final Discovery mission in February) but has been sitting idly, waiting for the crew to get around to firing it up. Now R2 is plugged in, and man is it ever chatty.
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