There's nothing like waking up and watching a successful rocket launch! After a relatively minor hold, the Dawn spacecraft was launched from Florida this morning on its journey to Ceres and Vesta (and possibly a few smaller encounters). Next up for the mission are a series of system "wakeups" and a slow "throttling up" of the vehicle's ion engines (for the earlier posting on Dawn, please see this entry).

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Japan launched its first probe to the Moon, Kaguya (or "Selene"), since its successful Hiten-Hagomoro probe in 1993. Relatively quiet since the 1960's, except for the occasional visitor such as a flyby of the Jupiter-bound Galileo, the orbital invasion began again in earnest in the 1990's with Hiten-Hagomoro, as well as Clementine, Lunar Prospector and the ESA's SMART-1. more...

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Is Peter Diamandis the real-life Harriman?

Thanks to Google, there's now a $25-30 million X-prize available to the team that lands a privately-funded rover on the moon by the end of 2012, takes some pictures, and moves at least 500 meters on the lunar surface. Details here. And here. And here. And here.

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When we last took a look at Mars, things looked bad for the Mars Rovers. A global dust storm threatened their power-generating capabilities. Was this the end of Spirit and Opportunity? more...

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Via BoingBoing, not quite worksafe flowcharts. But ones that probably best describe your day-to-day crisis management...

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When you look at something like this (a 1965 miniature library), you get a sense of how far technology has gone (and might still go). I routinely carry around several hundred books and stories with me on a storage card the fraction of the size of this gadet.

Why stop at some books? Why not the universe in a library? more...

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You can build anything with Lego! Even interstellar probes! Presenting a Lego version of the British Interplanetary Society's Daedalus probe to Barnard's Star.

Barnard's Runaway Star? You know the Medusae would never have stood for us poking around in their neighborhood!

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If you have been lucky enough to have clear, dark skies last night (and tonight), you might see this. It's raining Perseids!

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Watching the rendezvous between the space shuttle and the ISS right now. Usual inane, boring chatter on NASA TV. Trust NASA's public-relations machine to continue to make space travel...dull. You would think they would overlay some music like the Blue Danube Suite here!

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This weekend (if weather and other conditions permit) we will see a new probe being dispatched on its way to Mars. The Phoenix Mars Lander is a "reborn" version of the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, lost, along with a pair of impact probes, during its landing on Mars in 1999. The Phoenix is continuing the Martian mantra of "follow the water". It is intended to land in the high northern latitudes of Mars, clawing into the icy surface, to see if frozen water melts on a periodic basis...which might sustain a livable environment for microbes. The probe will employ landing thrusters instead of airbags (due to the fact that it is too heavy for current designs of airbags) and come down in what is hoped to be a smooth enough area allowing a touchdown and not a wrecked vehicle! The vehicle is the subject of some controversy, due to a problematic camera that is slated to be used during descent. Well, at least you can buy official licensed gear! And if we land humans on Mars, they can spend their free time going through the DVD that the Planetary Society crammed with Mars-related fiction and greetings from Earthlings.

Important mission? A potential problem-plagued mission? I'm keeping my fingers crossed that all goes well.

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Well, not quite. But here are a ton of links about one of the funniest SF (well, mostly)-related shows out there! MST3k! Everybody sing! more...

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To follow up on two previous postings about explorations of our Solar System, it is nice to see NASA finally realizing that a working spacecraft in outer space is definitely cheaper than a spacecraft that is designed from scratch. Two probes had successful missions: Deep Impact rendezvoused with Comet Tempel-1 on July 4, 2005, examining the comet as it flew by and also getting a peak inside by releasing a probe that impacted with the comet. The Stardust mission flew through the tail of Comet Wild-2 in order to collect samples of the comet's coma as well as (later in the mission) samples of interstellar dust. These samples were returned to Earth on January 15, 2006. Missions over, right? more...

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Jay Lake's Mainspring is on the ever-tottering Mount Toberead. Over at SF Signal (their review here), they link to a posting by David Levine. I think I've found Project Rho's (see the Atomic Rockets sub-site) missing twin!

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Sad news in private space this week. Rand Simberg has some thoughts, and we turn to Robert A. Heinlein for more thoughts.

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Following up on this posting, here's a quick update. Both Spirit and Opportunity are being threatened by large dust storms that are girdling the martian globe. It's not so much the force of the winds involved (remember that sequence from Mission to Mars?), but the amount of dust being raised. Both Spirit and Opportunity rely on solar power to keep them going and the amount of light getting through the dust is decreasing, as this sequence of pictures from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site shows. Will this be the end of these plucky devices?

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Following up on the Scaled Composites post, there's a lot of other interesting stuff going on in the areas of private and quasi-private space. more...

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So Burt Rutan, Scaled Composites and Northrop Grumman have announced that NG is going to increase their stake in Scaled Composites from 40% to 100%. A buyout, in other words. Maybe this is a positive, and NG will allow Rutan to run a Skunk Works for NG, employing his talents. Possibly, or equally possibly they take the current ideas, find that the cultures "don't match" and he'll move on. Klyde Morris has the best take on why it might be that somebody who was so independent seemed to agree to the deal that ran contrary to much of what we heard from this smaller shop.

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Following up on last week's posting, that concentrated on the inner planets, we now move outward in our solar system and visit three current or pending missions.

First up is the Dawn Mission, designed to explore the Asteroid Belt. This could almost be called the Phoenix Mission (except that name is already taken!) as the mission has gone from being active, to almost being canceled, and then back to a go again. more...

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(2006 continued...)

Is Spirit starting to show more than wear and tear on Mars?

"Once, when we radioed her to please leave the lecturing and hypothesis-making to the mission project team, she responded by forming her robotic arm into an obscene gesture," Banerdt said. "That arm contains a state-of-the-art spectrometer meant to provide crucial mineralogy data."

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(2006 continued...)

The review can now be seen here.

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