More Google parterships with NASA

This time, they're building an office complex at NASA's Ames Research Center. Before this, I was only aware of their co-funding of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Armageddon, here we come!

A lot of my fellow astronomers didn't like the movie Armageddon, since it was pretty ridiculous in its science. True enough, but I don't mind turning off my brain and having a fun time at the movies, so I enjoyed it. But the idea of having astronauts land on an Earth-crossing asteroid is getting some serious consideration now. Rob Landis at Johnson Space Center has been promoting this as a practice for some of the tasks we'll need to master for the manned Mars mission in a few(?) years. He's proposing to use the new Aries/Constellation Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would "land" on the Earth-crossing asteroid 2000SG344. Because it's so small (yacht-sized) and spins, it'd be a tough approach and would have to be anchored to the asteroid.

Landis has a few papers out on this topic. The full text of one is available as a PDF here: Scientific Exploration of Near-Earth Objects Via the Crew Exploration Vehicle. The abstract of another is here.

I love the idea. My only complaint is the use of that horrible PC wording NASA's trying to promote: "crewed" or "human" as opposed to "manned." Ugh! It's a butchery of the English language: "...experience conducting crewed exploration missions..."

The best data recovery I've ever heard of

I see here that a computer hard drive from the space shuttle Columbia has been restored, and 99% of the experimental data on it has been recovered. Wow. This, despite the fact that the outside of the drive was a melted lump of metal and plastic, the seal had broken open, and part of the disk had been pitted with dust-sized debris. But because the computer was running DOS, which stores data in one place at a time, rather than scattering it across the disk, it chanced that the damage was not to the place the experimental data was stored, and 99% of the experiment's results were recovered.

The experiment probed the effect called "shear thinning," which is how substances like canned whipped cream come out like a liquid but then stiffen. They measured shear thinning in xenon near its critical point. NASA's write-up is here (with photos!), and this is a link to the article itself, coming out in Phys. Rev. E.

I think I remember some acquaintances or friends of friends at NASA who had another experiment on Columbia, but I don't know if any of their data were recovered.

And now, drunken astronauts...

It just keeps getting better for NASA. While investigating patterns that could identify unstable astronauts like Lisa Nowak (who was planning to murder one of the others), they've found two occasions in which astronauts were flying drunk. And drunk enough to pose a flight safety risk.

Some of the commenters below this story have said, basically, aww, let 'em drink--they're getting sent off on a dangerous launch and they're just along for the ride. Well, no--the commander and pilot do have some interaction they've got to do with the shuttle during launch. And in case of an abort at any stage, they've got to be ready. Furthermore, even the Mission Specialists and Payload Specialists, who could more be said to be along for the ride, would need to be ready to follow emergency procedures if there were an accident.

Should I be disturbed that there appears to be an actual phrase, "bottle to throttle"?

The Supposed "Mercury 13" Women Astronauts

James Oberg has a good article in The Space Review debunking a growing myth about a supposed secret NASA program to put women in space in 1961. Which was cancelled by evil, sexist, chauvinist pig-men at NASA or the U.S. government.

I've seen a book on this subject, recently. From the jacket summary, it seemed a shockingly blatant account of pure sexual discrimination by NASA, and yanking the rug out from underneath a bunch of highly-trained women astronauts-to-be.

Well, Oberg has set me straight. It turns out there was never a NASA project for women astronauts to begin with. It was a private program, run by a doctor, Lovelace, who had supervised(?) NASA's medical tests on the actual Mercury astronaut candidates. Apparently, he'd decided to try this out with women, too, and he put several of them through the physiological tests to winnow out those who couldn't take the physical stresses of spaceflight.

And that was it. No spaceflight training. Their piloting skills were not as high as the mens', who were all military pilots and test pilots. And the program didn't end because those mean ol' men at NASA changed their minds and stabbed the women in the back. It ended because Lovelace didn't have the funding to go farther with his idea. NASA wasn't funding him at all, and Lovelace had to pay the Navy for the tests he wanted done.

I'd have to look up more, but I suspect from this that trying to apply "Project Mercury" or "the Mercury 13" to these women isn't justified in any way. But because it has a nice ring to it, since we're used to saying the "Mercury 7," those who perpetuate this myth are going to play it up. And reporters will repeat it.

Queen Elizabeth visits Goddard Space Flight Center

The Queen of England visited NASA today, at my old workplace, Goddard Space Flight Center. Curious if any of my friends & colleagues saw her or not. She went to a video conference with the space station astronauts, accompanied by the British-born American astronaut Michael Foale. I've met him, actually. When he came by Space Telescope with the other astronauts from the...third (?) Hubble servicing mission to brief us. I think he set an American space endurance record on the Mir.

This WTOP article says something I hadn't known: that "the flight center is home to the largest organization of scientists and engineers in the United States..." Huh! I knew it was big, but I didn't know just how it compared with other research centers.

(Possibly unintentionally) funny quote of the article: "The video link at the Goddard Space Flight Center was one-way, so the crew members could not see the queen standing by silently wearing a large yellow hat."

One more thing: although I disagree with the whole idea of monarchy, I am still impressed by the actions of a good king or queen. And I hadn't known this before:

The queen, a teenage princess during World War II, won permission in 1945 from her father, King George VI, to join the war effort as a driver in the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the British Army. She became known as No. 230873 Second Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor.