Around the world in 60 seconds

James Drake, a US-based science educator has produced a stunning timelapse video of Planet Earth at night.

Notable landmarks featured in the video include (by order of appearance): Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, the Amazon, Peru and Chile. The Earth’s ionosphere (thin yellow line) is also visible throughout the video.

The video features over 600 pictures from the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth website. For more visit James Drake’s Infinity Imagined website.

Swarming Satellite SPHERES of Doom

From MIT and DARPA (the folks that brought you the Internet), here’s SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites).

From the Wiki page:

The SPHERES experiment is a testbed consisting of three 8-inch diameter miniaturized satellites that can operate in a variety of environments, including inside the International Space Station (ISS). The MIT Space Systems Laboratory developed the experiment to provide the Air Force and NASA with a long term, replenishable, and upgradable testbed for formation flight. It will be used to validate high risk control, metrology, and autonomy technologies. The technologies are critical to the operation of distributed satellite and docking missions such as TechSat21, Starlight, Terrestrial Planet Finder, and Orbital Express. The SPHERES concept was inspired by the Training Remotes from Star Wars.

I have two words that explains my own fascination with.  Star. Wars.

And yes, there is YoutTubage:

To approximate the dynamics that will be encountered during these missions, the testbed consists of three small, self-contained vehicles, or “spheres,” which can control their relative positions and orientations, and is operable on a 2-D laboratory platform, NASA’s KC-135, and the International Space Station. SPHERES draws upon the MODE family of dynamics and control laboratories (STS-40, 42, 48, 62, MIR) by providing a cost-effective laboratory with direct astronaut interaction that exploits the micro-gravity conditions of space.

For me, the coolest thing about the video is watching the astronauts zip by in the background.

What’s Dextre doing?

Your daily gratuitous Dextre (from APoD):

What’s the world’s most complex space robot doing up there? Last week, Dextre was imaged moving atop the Destiny Laboratory Module of the International Space Station (ISS), completing tasks prior to the deployment of Japan‘s Kibo pressurized science laboratory. Dextre, short for the Canadian-built Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator, has arms three meters in length and can attach power tools as fingers. Behind Dextre is the blackness of space, while Earth looms over Dextre’s head. The Kibo laboratory segment being deployed during space shuttle Discovery’s trip to the ISS can be pressurized and contains racks of scientific experiment that will be used to explore many things, including how plants brace themselves against gravity, and how water might be inhibited from freezing in cells under microgravity.

ISS gets a boost

Anything in orbit – especially big anythings – eventually fall back to Earth if nothing is done about it. Old satellites, even entire space stations, have succumbed to gravity and the drag from the very (very) thin atmosphere at 200 km above Earth’s surface.

If the International Space Station were left to its own devices, it too would eventually be dragged down.

But every once in a while, she gets a boost up. This time it was from the European Space Agency’s Jules Verne.

From the ESA site:

ESA’s Jules Verne ATV was used for the first time early this morning to raise the orbit of the International Space Station. A 740-second burn of the Automated Transfer Vehicle’s main engines successfully lifted the altitude of the 280-tonne Station by around 4.5 km to a height of 342 km above the Earth’s surface.

There’s a cool animation of the event, over there too.

Korea in space

The International Space Station is truly an international undertaking. Astronauts from 15 countries have visited and spent time there, and Canadians have been stationed there more than any other country except Russia and the U.S.

Now Korea has entered the club. Take a look at this video of the Russian launch, and try to make note of how different from the American launched these are

First Korean woman in space

Here she is, Yi So-Yeon.

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And Here’s the full story, courtesy of Space-Travel.com.

(h/t to Matt C.)