Mr. .NET

via the Code Project daily newsletter…

ISS Science Officer Dan Pettit describes the smell of space after operating the airlock for 2 crewmates.

It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as “tastes like chicken.” The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation.

Last night Luc hosted his not-quite annual bonfire, many of our friends from Data Dynamics showed up as well as some of Luc’s friends and family and we all had a good time.  It was great to meet up with Phil and Chapel again, and  its always nice to meet the DD crew outside of the office.  The evening started off with a light misting and progressed to a light rain, however the fire dried us off and kept us warm.  Later in the night the clouds disappeared and I was able to catch a glimpse of Comet Holmes.  Of course, knowing that Luc lives way out in the country I had my star chart, red light, and binoculars with me.

The Bad Astronomer took a picture of the comet, and my view through the binoculars looked similar though much smaller of course.  I was also able to point out the comet to several friends at the bonfire and give them a taste of whats really up there    Luckily the comet and several of the stars in Perseus made a nice asterism and Capella gave me a great starting point.

Universe Today has a post outlining the future end of everything.

But a species can last tens or even hundreds of millions of years. So how can we predict when our number will be up?

There’s no way to know, but there’s a calculation that can help. It’s called the Doomsday Argument, developed in 1983 by astrophysicist Brandon Carter. According to Carter, if you assume that half of the humans who will ever live have already been born, you get approximately 60 billion people. If you assume that another 60 billion are yet to be born, our high population levels only give us another 9,000 years or so. Or more precisely, there’s a 95% chance that humanity will have ended by the year 11,000.

And it continues going up to the end of light through to 10^100 years from now, at the end of the proton.

Today is Hubble’s 17th birthday. Given the recent number of failures with its instruments I think its safe to say Hubble works in dog years.

Phil Plait showcases an incredible image of the Carina nebula released by the European Hubble science community.

via the Bad Astronomer, Sky Map is like google maps but for the night sky.

Its got a few quirks with it, if you scroll the map a large distance it thinks it needs to load all of the images again instead of just the new ones. It also doesn’t contain any solar system objects. Quirks aside, its a pretty cool web app.

If you do, how about you let me take it off your hands and I’ll visit the boundary between space and earth. I’ll even give you a sneak peek at what the trip may be like.

hat tip to the Bad Astronomer

via Digg, I doubt the picture was taken by a satellite as the caption says; but it doesn’t make the photo any less cool. A military jet flying over the space shuttle while its on the launch pad.

Thats the only thing I can think of after reading this article on space.com: Astronaut Charged With Kidnap Attempt. And they’re not talking about someone in the astronaut program training to go up…they’re talking about someone that was on the July shuttle mission!

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — An astronaut drove from Houston to Florida, donned a disguise and confronted a woman she believed was romantically involved with a space shuttle pilot she was in love with, police said. She was charged with attempted kidnapping and other counts.

U.S. Navy Capt. Lisa Nowak, 43, who flew last July on a shuttle mission to the international space station, was also charged with attempted vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence and battery. She was denied bail.

Seriously, WTF?!?

So it must be true, you do learn something new everyday. Practically everyone knows of the rings of Saturn, and many people know of the rings around Uranus and Neptune. However, I didn’t know that Jupiter also had has a ring system.

I discovered this while reading the mission plan for New Horizon’s Jupiter encounter.

[Feb. 24] 05:30 [Days after closest approach] -4.01 [Event] Rings: search for embedded ringmoons (LORRI)
Because of its communications problems, Galileo was unable to perform searches for as-yet-undiscovered moons in Jupiter’s ring system. New Horizons will perform the most detailed survey of Jupiter’s rings to date: LORRI will take 49 images over 8 hours.

Parts in bold are my own text.

via The Planetary Society blog

[Edit: changed some wording from past to present tense]

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) is no longer working. This same instrument has had troubles before and had been operating on a set of backup electronics, but it appears that those too have failed.

Given the enormous success with the Mars rovers, lasting many times longer than initially thought, it can be difficult to remember just how harsh the environment of space really is to electronics. The ACS had an expected lifetime of five years and was only a couple months shy of that expectation.

You can find lots of images from the ACS at its website.

via The Bad Astronomer and The Flame Trench