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 15th), 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.