All posts by TopSpacer

History, Space Policy

Former astronaut Mae Jemison on NPR + Space policy analyst Alan Steinberg on The Space Show

A reader points me to an audio clip of NASA astronaut Mae C. Jemison participating in the NPR Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me game show. They begin with some fun discusion of how she got interested in science and space: Astronaut Mae Jemison Plays Not My Job – NPR

In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman to fly in space when she served as a science mission specialist. We’ve invited Jemison to play a game called “Excuse me? When do we get to the Southwest terminal?” Jemison has flown in the space shuttle Endeavour, so we thought we’d ask her questions about a sometimes more unpredictable vehicle … the airport shuttle.

===

Alan Steinberg spoke on the Space Show on Friday about “Protecting our space assets, weapons in space, space policy and public opinion”: Alan Steinberg, Friday, 2-1-13 – Thespaceshow’s Blog

Alan took lots of questions about the role and impact on policy of space advocacy and as you will hear, its not easy or clear to pin down.  Alan had much to say on how best to influence members of congress but was clear in pointing out that space advocacy does not have the numbers of the larger and more powerful lobbying groups that are far more effective in influencing policy than is the space community.

Amateur/Student Satellite

AMSAT and ISS amateur radio news

Go to AMSAT News for the latest headlines about developments in amateur and student satellites and for updates about amateur radio on the ISS.

ANS 034 Weekly AMSAT Bulletin – February 2, 2013:
* January/February 2013 AMSAT Journal at the Print Shop Now
* Fox-1 Main Computer Engineering Prototype Comes Alive
* AMSAT Website Recovery Update
* Straight Key Night on OSCAR 2013
* ESA Call for Proposals: FLY YOUR SATELLITE!
* CQ Magazine Newsroom Space News
* Eastern VHF-UHF-Microwave Conference April 26-27-28
* Central States VHF Conference – July 25-28

Rocketry

Australian ASLI rockets to carry student payloads

A reader points me to the Australian advanced rocketry group  Academic Space Launch Initiative (ASLI), which was profiled in an Moreton Bay newpaper: Candles and chemicals mixed to launch rockets into space in Academic Space Launch Initiative project – The Courier-Mail – Jan.19.13.

The organization, formed by Wayne Tayor and Jamie Anderson, seeks to provide rides to high altitudes for payloads designed and built by university students .

Here’s a blog post about one of the recent ASLI rocket tests: ASLI Completes First Demonstration Flight Of Educational Payload Rocket. – ASLI 2010 – Dec.5.12

Astronomy, Space participation, Space Science, The Moon

Citizen science – recent activity at four projects

I often talk here about the proliferation of citizen science projects. I thought I would scan the blogs of four space related projects at Zooniverse and see what their blogs are talking about these days.

* Planet Hunters –  In this project, participants scan data from the Kepler  space observatory to look for a drop in the brightness of a star when a planet orbits in front of it as seen from our point of view.

What factors impact transit shape – Planet Hunters blog – This post discusses an effort to make simulated transits look more like the real ones.

2012_Transit_of_Venus_from_SFTransit of Venus – Image credit Wikipedia

* Galaxy Zoo – With millions of galaxies to classify, this project takes advantage of the human powers of pattern recognition and lets participants decide into which category a galaxy should go according to its shape and features.

Spiral Galaxies and the Future of Citizen Science: a Live Chat – Galaxy Zoo blog – An online chat show brings “Some of the Galaxy Zoo Science Team” together to “talk about a recent paper on measuring spiral arm features via a computer algorithm, including how it compares to human classifications and what this means for the future of volunteer-driven citizen science.” The “also introduce — and have a bit of fun with — the jargon gong.”

* Moon Zoo – With the thousands of images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, participants classify the myriad types of lunar surface features.

Flying over Taurus-Littrow – Moon Zoo blog – This post points to dramatically lit images of the Taurus-Littrow site where Apollo 17 landed.

Taurus-Littrow

 

* Planet Four – In this project, participants help “find and mark ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ on the Martian surface. Scientists believe that these features indicate wind direction and speed. By tracking ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ over the course of several Martian years to see how they form, evolve, disappear and reform, we can help planetary scientists better understand Mars’ climate.”

to the North! – Planet Four Blog –  The project currently only has image data for the Martian southern hemisphere but they will eventually get northern imagery. A JPL video discusses the features in the north that the project wants to investigate

Science and Technology

Sci-Tech: The SailRocket goes where no sail boat has gone before

Here’s a fascinating article about the Vestas Sailrocket, which broke what was considered a hard limit on sail boat speed:  How a Boat-Plane Hybrid Shattered the Sound Barrier of Sailing – Autopia/Wired.com

When I traveled to Namibia a year before, I had met a daredevil yachtsman with his eyes on a big prize. But now that he has it, all Larsen can talk about is the hydrodynamic frontier. “What we are discovering is that things are not as black-and-white going through this barrier as we thought they were,” he says. The mixture of air, vapor, and very high speed water wrapping itself around a boat at the limit is dynamic and extremely hard to model by computer or even simulate in a high-speed flow tank. To understand it, you must explore it directly, through experimentation. You need SailRocket.