The New Curiosity Shop

In the small hours of tomorrow morning, NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft will crash land on the moon. The craft will be deliberately hard-landed in two sections providing data about the composition of the lunar surface. NASA TV will provide live coverage and you can find out more on the Spaceweather site.

images courtesy of NASA

[caption id="attachment_243" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

… today, forty years ago. On 20th July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another planet. How will you celebrate today?

Neil Armstrong (courtesy of NASA, Andrew Chaikin)

New Scientist has compiled a top ten of Apollo music for your 40th anniversary party. Or why not delve into the history with the NCS course The Story Of Apollo?

After 40 years the achievement is still staggering and seems to be nearly impossible. Let’s celebrate Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins and all of the NASA support team who made the trip possible.

The celebrations of forty years since the Apollo 11 moon landing are heating up and now we have a new moon mission on its way. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took off from Cape Canaveral on Thursday and will photograph the lunar surface in higher resolution than ever before. Images with a resolution of 1 m should be able to pick out equipment left behind at the old Apollo sites, including the LEM descent stages. The conspiracy theorists can work out their own version of these images we’re sure.

The LRO will also laser map the Moon and look for signs of water ice in permanently shadowed craters. A companion spacecraft, launched on the same booster, called LCROSS, will crash land in one of those craters in an attempt to kick up some of the buried ice that may be buried there.

There is more information and regular updates at the LRO website.

The first 6 strong crew of ISS

The International Space Station crew is awaiting the arrival of three new members that will usher in an era of six-person crews aboard the orbiting laboratory. Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Bob Thirsk launched aboard a Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday morning from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. 

The Soyuz is scheduled to dock with the station today. The trio will join station Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineers Mike Barratt of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to form the Expedition 20 crew. It will mark the first time all five partner agencies are represented by astronauts on the station at the same time. 

The expanded crew of the International Space Station will discuss the start of six-person operations in a news conference on Monday. The news conference will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the NASA Web site. 

For full reports on the International Space Station, visit the ISS site.

The Story Of Apollo

The New Curiosity Shop has just launched a new kind of course. A mix between a science course and a history course, The Story Of Apollo will take learners back to the cold war era to examine the cultural factors and the engineering that made possible the US moon missions and the eventual landing of men on the Moon in 1969.

Astronomy tutor, Mark Toner said, “It is nice to branch out into another field that is of interest to me. Now the events which inspired me as a child are the stuff of history. I hope that I can transmit some of my enthusiasm to the students who take this new course.”

The Story Of Apollo is live now, and you can investigate it on the NCS web site.

NASA has announced the names of the researchers who will start the Lunar Science Institute. The seven scientists will head research teams in a number of areas of lunar science, all directed towards making the best use of future lunar exploration. While the engineering work on a new manned spacecraft system is under review, possibly forcing NASA to fall back on existing technology such as Atlas, the creation of a Science Institute is probably a more convincing step in showing the commitment of the US to a return to the Moon.

Carle Pieters of Brown University will head a group investigating the Moon in the context of the early development of Earth, Venus, Mercury and Mars. The scientific and exploration potential of the lunar poles will be investigated by a team led by Ben Bussey of  Johns Hopkins University. David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute will be looking at how impacts were important in the formation of the Moon. The lunar environment will be investigated by William Farrell, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. William Bottke, Southwest Research Institute, will lead the team researching the history of impacts on the Moon. Jack Burns, University of Colorado, will head a group with the interesting goal of exploring the cosmos from the Moon. Finally, Mihaly Horanyi, also of University of Colorado, will take charge of the Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies.

More from the Lunar Science Institute…

NASA Image

Spacecraft watchers have found a new object to track as it orbits the Earth. Edward Light saw an orbiting tool bag using 10×50 binoculars as it sailed over his backyard in Lakewood, New Jersey, after sunset on November 22nd. The toolbag had been dropped during a spacewalk by shuttle astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper and has proved to be a surprisingly bright orbiting object despite its small size. You can find out more about the flying toolbag on NASA’s Spaceweather site.

Meanwhile, European leaders are meeting to discuss the goals of Europe’s activities in space. More from the BBC…

On Friday, August 1st, the Moon will pass directly in front of the Sun producing a total solar eclipse.  The narrow path of totality stretches from arctic Canada through Greenland, Siberia, and Mongolia, and comes to an end in China, where millions of people will witness the event.  Even more people will see the partial eclipse, visible from almost all of Europe, the Middle East, India, Asia and a corner of North America.  The action begins at approximately 09:20 UT (10:20 am BST) when the Moon’s shadow first hits Earth in northern Canada and begins its rapid sweep toward China.

Visit NASA’s Spaceweather site for photos, webcasts, timetables and full coverage of the eclipse.

Just before 1am this morning (BST), NASA’s Phoenix lander successfully landed in the Arctic region of Mars. High on the list of exploration targets for Phoenix is the search for frozen water.

The photograph shows Phoenix parachuting down to its landing site and was taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which was overhead at the time.

More from NASA.