Spacey Goodness

Here’s a roundup of some cool space things I’ve spotted online in the past couple months!

Don Pettit, who’s been living and working onboard the ISS since late December, is blogging for Air & Space Magazine. His entries have been pretty great so far, and quite candid. Make sure you read his “Forced Smile” entry if you want a real, raw look at some of the, ahem, NOT-so-fun things involved in spaceflight. His account of what a Soyuz launch is like is also good.

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Two Canadian teenagers sent a Lego-naut to 85,000 feet using a weather balloon! Critics would argue that 85,000 feet is not technically space, but that’s just semantics. I love Lego-naut!

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Did you hear about the big solar storm that came our way last week? It made for some spectacular auroras, as you can see above in real time. Seems like most aurora videos are time-lapse, so I had no idea the aurora moved and flickered that much in real time! Amazing. I so want to see the this with my own eyes someday. It turns out that solar activity has another benefit too — it makes our atmosphere expand a bit, which helps clear out some of the space junk floating around up there.

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This is a neat mini-documentary on the AstroVan that carried astronauts to the launch pad from 1984 until the end of the space shuttle program. 0 to 35 in a minute and a half!

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I mentioned recently that NASA has stepped up its game when it comes to releasing cool photos and videos, but so have the Russians. This is a neat little video from Roscosmos from a couple years ago that they just reposted, showing a Soyuz spacecraft and rocket being rolled out to the launch pad and lifting off. They have several variants of the Soyuz rocket that all look basically the same, but you can tell this is a Soyuz spacecraft because it has the launch escape system installed on top. (Well, and it says “Soyuz TMA” on the side too, which is the name of the manned spacecraft, but you’d have to be able to read Cyrillic to recognize that.)

This cool poster from Universe Today is celebrating the Opportunity rover’s 8 years on Mars. 8 years! And still going! At the moment, Opportunity is parked on the rim of a crater ready to face another rough Martian winter. Its twin, Spirit, operated for 6+ years before sending its last transmission in March 2010. And to think they were only intended for a 90 DAY mission. 90 days versus 8 years. Pretty impressive.