NPR: NASA, SpaceX Aim To Launch Private Era In Orbit →

Tomorrow morning at 4:55a EDT, SpaceX’s spaceship, Dragon, makes its first attempt to dock with the ISS. In case this doesn’t already send excited chills down people’s backs, think of it this way:

This is the first time that a private spaceship has EVER docked with the International Space Station. The firm that is launching this spaceship is the one run by Elon Musk, the guy who hopes to put humans on Mars within a few decades. This could be the first step towards that.

How’s that for exciting?

"Broadening its challenge to the United States, the Chinese government on Thursday announced an ambitious five-year plan for space exploration that would move China closer to becoming a major rival at a time when the American program is in retreat."

NYT: China Unveils Ambitious Plan to Explore Space.

Technology Review: Pioneer Anomaly Solved By 1970s Computer Graphics Technique →

The Pioneer Anomaly has seemingly been resolved by the same technology used to render graphics in real-time in video games. Impressive.

Sun-centric vs. Earth-centric solar system →

Really cool informational model/object (can’t call it a graphic since it’s moving, right?). Shows how complicated the Earth-centric solar system is, compared to the Sun-centric one… Of course, if we were to look at the Sun-centric galaxy against a Sagittarius A-centric galaxy model, it would probably be even more amusing. Still, thank you Copernicus! Truly enjoyable. [via io9]

APOD: The Crown of the Sun. Solar eclipse as seen from Easter Island.

SPACE.com: Heftiest Star Discovery Shatters Cosmic Record. 300 times the mass of our sun.

NYT: Senate Committee’s NASA Plan Cuts Moon Program →

After all the hullabaloo, the Senate committee responsible for the NASA budget and the White House seemed to reach a compromise pretty quickly. I wonder how much of the earlier hullabaloo was just negotiation tactics…

Technology Review: The Death of Nemesis: The Sun's Distant, Dark Companion →

Apparently, it is almost certainly the case that mass extinctions occur every 26 to 27 million years (as per paleobiologists who have studied fossil records over the past 500 million years). One of the theories suggested to explain this peculiar periodicity was that the Sun has a twin, nicknamed Nemesis, that cuts through the Oort Cloud every 26-27 million years, thereby sending a flood of matter raining towards the inner solar system.

This article says the Nemesis theory is wrong. But, still, the idea is pretty cool.

APOD: Moons Beyond the Rings of Saturn. An amazing photo taken by the Cassini spacecraft.

APOD: A Giant Planet for Beta Pic. One of the few “exoplanets” that we have an actual picture of. Exoplanets is the nickname given to planets not in our solar system. Pretty cool.

APOD: Sunset from the International Space Station. They get to see that 16 times a day.

Orlando Sentinel: SpaceX signs deal with Iridium for $492M →

This is great news for President Obama’s proposed plans for NASA. With commercial launches of near-Earth spacecraft taking off (sorry, had to put that in), it becomes reasonable to hand off such mundane jobs to commercial ventures and let NASA deal with cutting-edge space exploration. From the article:

Musk also asserted that SpaceX’s  business success validates President Barack Obama’s proposal to outsource to companies like SpaceX the flying of cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station.

On a side note, Iridium’s current satellites are useful for another thing: impressing other people with your knowledge of satellite flares.

[via Slashdot]

Gravity Probe B Mission →

This is an amazing experiment being run by NASA in order to experimentally test Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The probe is a finely-tuned gyroscope floating freely (!) within a larger satellite with a telescope attached to the main body that is aimed at a distant star to retain a set axis on which the gyroscope would spin, were it to not affected by the earth’s presence as per general relativity. The drift in the gyroscope’s axis of rotation over a year will test the following general-relativity-predicted effects:

1. The geodetic effect—the amount by which the Earth warps the local spacetime in which it resides.
2. The frame-dragging effect—the amount by which the rotating Earth drags its local spacetime around with it.

So cool! It’s amazing that we can actually even try to detect the effects of general relativity around the Earth; as the linked page explains, the effects being sought are the definition of infinitesimal! I am blown away by this kind of stuff.

[via crooked indifference]

Discovery: NASA Aircraft Videos Hayabusa Re-Entry →

The JAXA spacecraft returning with a sample of an asteroid made it successfully back to the Earth’s surface today. NASA actually captured the reentry on video.

BBC News - Japan unfurls Ikaros solar sail in space. Remember all those science fiction stories about spacecraft propelled by light emanating from the sun? Take out the fiction and you have the story of Ikaros, the Japanese space agency’s solar sail test craft. Amazing.