Researchers at Big Bear Solar Observatory have tuned their adaptive optics array and achieved first light, capturing this image of a sunspot that is now the most detailed ever captured in visible light. The image was captured with Big Bear’s New Solar Telescope (NST), a brand new instrument (as the name implies) with a resolution of just 50 miles on the sun’s surface.
The NST is the precursor to an even-larger telescope, the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), which will be constructed over the next decade, allowing Big Bear researchers to build a new kind of adaptive optics system known as multi-conjugate adaptive optics, that should provide them with a clear, distortion-free means of observing the sun from Earth in unrivaled detail.
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Next Monday, a small group of crazy Danish geniuses plan to launch their own homebuilt rocket into space, after towing it to the launch site via their homebuilt submarine. Who needs NASA?
The non-profit firm known as Copenhagen Suborbital left port with the Heat1X-TychoBrae rocket on Friday, towing the rocket and its launching pad to a spot in the Baltic Sea. If everything goes as planned, the rocket will rise to about 93 miles above the earth — about halfway to the International Space Station — where a capsule with a test dummy will float back to water.
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 China has finished the first module of a planned space station and is testing its electronics and other systems before launching it into orbit next year.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported on the module’s schedule Tuesday. It also said changes were being made on a two-stage Long March 2F rocket that will carry the 8.5-ton Tiangong 1 module into a set orbit.
The Shenzhou 8 spacecraft will dock with it in the second half of 2011, with the Shenzhou 9 and 10 to follow in 2012, Xinhua said.
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United Space Alliance announced today that the company will layoff about 15 percent of its current Space Shuttle workforce, effective October 1, 2010, in order to align the workforce level with the company’s Space Shuttle Program Operations Contract work scope and current budget.
Two missions remain in the Space Shuttle Program – STS-133 currently scheduled for no earlier than November 1, 2010, and STS-134 set for February 26, 2011.
USA employs approximately 8,100 employees at its Florida, Texas and Alabama sites. The reduction in force will affect multiple disciplines and multiple organizations across the company. It is expected to impact about 800-1000 employees in Florida, about 300-400 employees in Texas, and about 10 Alabama.
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An experimental solar-powered plane took off from western Switzerland on Wednesday for a 24-hour test flight – a key step in a historic effort to one day circle the globe using only energy collected from the sun.
The plane with its 262.5-foot (80-meter) wingspan left Payerne airfield shortly before 7 a.m. after overcoming an equipment problem that delayed a previous attempt, the Solar Impulse team said.
Clear blue skies on Wednesday allowed the prototype aircraft to soak up plenty of solar energy as it flew over the Jura mountains west of the Swiss Alps. The big question, however, was whether the plane’s 12,000 solar cells could fill up its batteries with enough energy so the plane could fly through the night.
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 The University of Hawaii Board of Regents unanimously approved a plan Monday to build the world’s largest telescope at Mauna Kea’s summit.
The decision clears the way for managers of the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope to seek a permit from the state to build the facility on conservation land. TMT managers aim to begin construction late next year and finish by 2018 if they can get a permit.
Some Native Hawaiians have opposed the telescope on the grounds it would defile Mauna Kea’s summit, which they consider sacred. Environmentalists say the telescope would harm the rare wekiu bug.
But the board was moved by the potential it offered for advancing science, providing jobs and helping the economy. The university’s board must vote on the project because it owns the lease for the land on which the telescope would be built.
“I think it would be almost unthinkable not to approve this project for what it would mean for scientific research and astronomy, what it would mean for education, and the answers it may provide to unlock the mysteries of the universe,” said board member Chuck Gee.
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The first of the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS telescopes is now on the lookout for threatening near-Earth objects, but its vision is impaired due to the US military.
From its perch atop the Haleakala volcano in Maui, Hawaii, PS1’s mammoth, 1400-megapixel camera should uncover 100,000 new asteroids and identify any that are on a collision course with Earth. However, the US air force, which funded the development of the telescope, requires that software automatically black out a swathe of pixels to hide the trajectories of passing satellites.
Pan-STARRS (an acronym for Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System) is a planned array of astronomical telescopes and cameras and computing facility that will survey the sky on a continual basis, including accurate astrometry and photometry of detected objects. By detecting any differences from previous observations of the same areas of the sky, it is expected to discover a very large number of new asteroids, comets, variable stars and other celestial objects. Its primary mission is to detect near-Earth objects that threaten to cause impact events. It is expected to create a database of all objects visible from Hawaii (three-quarters of the entire sky) down to apparent magnitude 24.
Pan-STARRS’ first telescope, called PS1, is located at the summit of Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii, and went online on December 6, 2008, under the administration of the University of Hawaii. PS1 began full time science observations on May 13, 2010, and the PS1 Science Mission is underway, with operations funded by The PS1 Science Consortium or PS1SC, a consortium including the Max Planck Society in Germany, National Central University in Taiwan, Edinburgh, Durham and Queen’s Belfast Universities in the UK, and Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities in the United States and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network.
The Pan-STARRS Project is a collaboration between the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Maui High Performance Computing Center and Science Applications International Corporation. Telescope construction is funded by the United States Air Force. Having completed PS1, the Pan-STARRS Project is now focusing on building PS2, and then the full array of four telescopes, sometimes called PS4. Completing the array of four telescopes is estimated at a total cost of US$100 million for the entire array.
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Minerals that can only be formed in the presence of liquid water have again been detected on Mars, this time in huge craters in the low-lying terrain of the red planet’s northern hemisphere.
The new survey found the so-called hydrated minerals in nine giant craters dotting the northern plains of Mars. The minerals appear to have been formed by liquid water more than 3 billion years ago, suggesting that past water on Mars altered the planet’s surface much more significantly than researchers previously thought.
“The southern hemisphere of Mars is ancient – over 4 billion years old,” lead researcher John Carter, of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Orsay, France, told SPACE.com. “It’s highly cratered with lots of geological structures, and there are quite a few sites where we have these hydrated minerals. So, we already knew that there was likely liquid water on or near the surface of early Mars.”
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Even in the company of other astronauts, Buzz Aldrin is still the hippest guy in the room. At the 2010 Astronaut Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which took place earlier this month at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Buzz was the Jack Nicholson to NASA’s Oscars. He exuded an effortless cool just by smiling at the crowd, and all eyes were on him even when he wasn’t meant to be the center of attention. The ceremony’s host, Jon Cryer (because when you think of astronauts, you think of the guy who played “Duckie“), perfectly summed up the feelings of pretty much everybody in the audience. “From the moment I arrived,” he said, “it has been all that I can do to keep from saying, ‘So Buzz, when you were like on the Moon and stuff, was it awesome’?”
Of course, Buzz wasn’t the only man to walk on the Moon. There have been eleven others. But he was the second one to do it. And as he once reminded Homer Simpson, “Second comes right after first!” Over the last few months, it seems like Buzz has been everywhere, doing absolutely nothing you’d expect from an 80-year-old legend who’s witnessed magnificent desolation firsthand. He’s rapped about rockets with Snoop Dogg, hosted a WWE Raw wrestling match, stolen scenes from Tina Fey on 30 Rock, and did the Cha-cha-cha on Dancing With the Stars. (A curious side note: He was the second contestant to be voted off Dancing With the Stars this season, which proves that Buzz is nothing if not consistent.) Neil Armstrong may’ve taken a giant leap for mankind, but Buzz tweets and has his own iPhone app.
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Congress Develops New Bill To Slash Commercial Space Funding
The Senate subcommittee charged with NASA oversight will present a $19 billion bill this week that kills President Barack Obama’s proposed shakeup of the agency’s human-spaceflight program, in the process cutting billions from commercial rocket and technology projects that supporters say would have benefited Kennedy Space Center.
Though the bill effectively cancels the delayed and over-budget Constellation moon-rocket program — as Obama requested in his NASA budget — it would repurpose that money to build a new heavy-lift rocket while largely ignoring the president’s call to fund new space-faring technology and commercial rockets that would send humans into space.
A draft of the bill, obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, was presented to NASA last week by the committee, chaired by Florida Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. So far the White House has not commented on the bill, but several Florida Space Coast leaders have expressed concern about its impact here.
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