Wow, it’s been a long time since I posted anything here, but there hasn’t been much space action recently to write about.  As a catch up here are some of the things I should have blogged about, but didn’t get round to!

On February 10th, at 4:56pm,  Two satellites in earth orbit  were destroyed in the first ever satellite collision in  space 500 miles above the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia.  The relative speed of the impact was 26,170mph! The satellites involved were a live and fully functional “Iridium 33” (part of the Iridium satellite phone network that you may have seen the comic relief climbers using on Kilimanjaro) and a defunct Russian Kosmos 2251 communications satellite which had been dead since 1995. This collision has created a huge debris cloud in space.  The effect of this debris is really scary, perhaps leading to something called the “Kessler Syndrome” where the debris from this collision collides with other satellites, and that debris then collides with more satellites and before you know it (in a process called Ablation cascade) earth orbit is full of razor sharp bits of metal flying around randomly at 10,000+ miles per hour making being in space even more dangerous than it is now. (You can see a great diagram of this, here, via APOD)

Earlier this month, on the 6th march, a new space telescope was launched called Kepler. Read more about it here.  It’s main job is to SEARCH FOR EXTRASOLAR PLANETS! How cool is that?  It’s not a direct replacement for the ageing hubble ‘scope but it will be ‘complementary’.  There is a shuttle mission scheduled to repair hubble soon, more details on that below. The mission will last for 3.5 years and aims to discover and catalogue planets within the ‘habitable zones’ around nearby stars.

In dramatic news, the International space station was evacuated last Thursday (12th March) for fear that it was about to be hit by space debris.  Although not connected to the satellite collision mentioned above, it’s still a sign that this issue of debris is being taken seriously.  The debris passed by eventually and life on the station went on as usual, but it was really interesting to see how the news spread almost as fast as it can via twitter. Normaly, the ISS ground crew actually move the station out of the way of debris by boosting it’s orbit, but in this case they didn’t have time.  The crew closed all the interior hatches and took refuge in the Russian Soyuz escape capsule. Upadate: This has just happend again, on monday!

The main news is that last night (Sunday March 15^th), Space shuttle Discovery launched just before midnight on mission STS-119 to the international space station. You can watch the launch in glorious HD here (also watch this HD video taken from a guys back yard 40 miles away!!!!).  The aim of this mission is to fit out a new set of solar panels and a truss section to the ISS.  Should be some hot spacewalking action over the next 14 days so stay tuned.

From Wikipedia:STS-119 will deliver the S6 solar arrays to the space station, completing the construction of the Integrated Truss Structure.[8] STS-119 will be used for several experiments, including Shuttle Ionospheric Modification with Pulsed Local EXhaust (SIMPLEX), Shuttle Exhaust Ion Turbulence Experiments (SEITE), and Maui Analysis of Upper Atmospheric Injections (MAUI). STS-119 will also be used for the “Boundary Layer Transition Detailed Test Objective” experiment. One tile in the thermal protection system will be raised 0.25 inches (6.4 mm) above the others so that, at about Mach 15 during reentry, a boundary layer transition will be initiated.

I recently bought myself a really cheep “fish-eye” converter for my camera from eBay, and surprisingly it’s not half as bad as I was expecting it to be. Yes it’s blurry round the edges and looks about as far from anything professional as you could get, but it did only cost five pounds.  It would have been rude not to!  Anyway, it is a .45 multiplier which on my 18-55mm kit lens, at the 18 end of the tube makes the effective focal distance 8mm ish.. I’m not going to get anything as wide as that until I get round to buying the sigma 10-20 (and then it’s 2mm longer, but sooo much nicer looking with it)

It’s been really cloudy here, and when it is clear, it just doesn’t get dark, I guess that’s the english summer for you.  I did manage to take a couple of shots of the ISS on consecutive nights, although tonight i was really aiming for the Early Ammonia Servicer which i think I saw, but in a totally unexpected part of the sky.  I’ll get it next time…

Last night I snapped Lacrosse 5 as it made its way over my house.  Lacrosse 5 is one of the US military classified Spy Satellites (or DarkSats if you are feeling dramatic).  I wanted to get one long exposure with it arcing across the full frame, but a series of screw-ups meant I got three different pics.  While I was watching it, I did wonder what it was watching as it sailed across my back garden (probably not much seeing as it was night… )

It looks like STS-124 launched without incident, no damage or issues being reported. It’s a shame the same can’t be said for Launch pad 39a at KSC which pretty much got blown apart (ok that’s a bit of an exaggeration) when Discovery took off. 

Those are pieces of pad 39a splashing into the water below Disco’s Plume

I snapped this a few nights ago (5/6/2008 00:01:55hrs 48sec exposure).  It’s a quite amazing flare from a NOSS Pair (3-4 I think).  It was purely by chance that I saw them rising fast in the southwest and I hit the shutter on the cam about half way through the flare.  As you can see, I didn’t really think about focus, this was taken with the Kit 18-55 lens on my D40x and it will loose focus if you even look at the lens funny.  There has been some heavy post pro on this image in photoshop to loose the light pollution and bring out as much sharpness as I can.

STS-124 is underway following the successful launch of Discovery on Saturday night.  The main element of the mission is the installation of the second part of the Japanese Kibo research lab, although i suspect of more pressing importance to the crew will be the replacement pump for the toilet.  I hate to think how the ISS must smell, I remember the MIR has its own musty mouldy smell, along with a fruit fly infestation. But that’s another story.

There were rumours all day that the MRO HiRise camera had another great image on it’s way back to us on planet Earth.  Here it is, superb clarity, all the elements of the mission (minus the crew stage which probably burnt up) are in this shot.  

The Phoenix mission seems to be shifting focus away from pure science, and back to humanity. It’s like the late great Carl Sagan has touched this mission from the beyond (he’d love that idea!) Not only did we have the amazing photo of Phoenix’s EDL (which provokes in me the same silent awe, feelings of loneliness, and immense pride that I get from the Pale Blue Dot image and the Apollo Earthrise) but there is also the whole “Visions of Mars” project.

Essentially, the Planetary Society made a special one-off DVD out of silica glass, which is designed to last hundreds or even a thousand years. It contains messages from Carl Sagan, Arthur C Clarke and others along with thousands of names submitted to the Planetary society’s website. One day, and I think before too long, that disk will be retrieved and played. You can only guess at who will be reading it, but to mount an expedition to retrieve it, they will most likely be permanent residents.

I think that I missed a trick personally, as I don’t think I entered my name. I remember reading about it and thinking it was a good idea, but did I get round to it? I don’t know.

What worries me more is that I think the Planetary Society missed a trick too, if I had a chance to send a DVD into space where I knew it would be safe for a thousand years, I would try and cram as much human knowledge onto it as I could. I don’t trust this planet to be around long enough for us to keep our own history and knowledge safe (I still worry about the destruction of the Library of Alexandra).

Living in the UK, I don’t have easy access to NASA TV except through the on-line web streams. You can view NASA TV directly from the NASA website, but if you look around you can find better quality stream out there. You could try this one which is a blistering 1200kbps, which is too fast for my domestic net connection or this one at a more modest 500kbps.

Update (16.10.08): I’ve just tried both these streams and they still appear to be live! Clicking on the link doesn’t always work, I have to “copy link” and then paste it into the “open URL” menu in windows media player. If you know of any other streams, please post them in the comments!