sts-130
Posted on | January 20, 2010 | Comments Off
just a few more shuttle missions this year, and the fleet will be retired from use. sts-130 is the 130th shuttle mission and the 32nd mission to the international space station. they will be delivering the tranquility node, a seven windowed module which will serve as the control room for the station’s robotic arm. target launch date is currently set in the early morning of february 7, 2010. endeavour is the shuttle of choice.
my mom has a cousin whose daughter, jill, is the engineering branch chief in the aircraft operations division at johnson space center. in 1994, she was considered as an astronaut candidate. but her work with the t-38s is more notable. she helped upgrade the avionics to these aircrafts in the early 1990s. you can read more about this and the t-38s in the june 2008 edition of the johnson space center newsletter, “roundup” [pdf]. (the pdf is a better format for reading.) nasa tv has a clip (on youtube) of the dress rehearsal of the astronauts for sts-130. the jets in the beginning of this video are t-38s.
with someone from nasa twittering about the shuttle launches and everyone else in the virtual world responding and posting tweets of their own, you can follow an interesting stream of chatter about the sts-130 launch at twitter’s search page.
you can watch a time lapse account of the shuttle endeavour being rolled out from the vab to the pad. four hours shortened to to less than three minutes.
hubble on the imax
Posted on | December 30, 2009 | Comments Off
i was sitting through the previews of avatar and caught the 3-D clip of an upcoming presentation of the shuttle launch serving hubble for the final time in may of 2009. nasa shot the presentation using imax 3-D cameras. this will debut spring 2010. (http://imax.com/hubble/)
this happens to be the shuttle mission which i got to witness the launch in person. not only did i get to see the launch with my own eyeballs but with this presentation i get to see the up close and 3-D personal of the entire mission on the really big screen. awesome!
christmas avatar
Posted on | December 27, 2009 | Comments Off
christmas 2009 seemed shorter and less like christmas this year than in the past. maybe it was because i felt like i was doing so much as soon as thanksgiving ended until christmas or maybe it was that i didn’t start my traditional christmas music until after our christmas musical, but it was different than past years. we’ll see how christmas goes next year.
i am planning on seeing avatar tomorrow with some pals. i caught this clip on the fox movie channel about the making of the movie. it is actually ironic, i think, that the plot of the movie involves an avatar and the making of the characters as avatars was very similar to the same approach. watch the video below to see how the cg animation is a direct modeling of the actors’ actual acting.
keep looking »
latest twitter
- mock: i find it odd that mars, inc saw fit to make a bag of m's of 2.87oz. that seems random. it's 81.4g. #weird http://twitpic.com/12105x
- mock: was there some game on? RT @NASA: Live coverage of shuttle Endeavour's STS-130 launch begins at 11p ET on NASA TV & http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
- mock: sometimes i feel like a magnet for conspiracy theorists.
- mock: 4 shots of espresso + espresso brownie = awakeness