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• NASA Astronaut Stephen K. Robinson Leaves Agency

  3 July 2012

  

  HOUSTON — NASA astronaut Stephen Robinson has left the space agency. Robinson ends his 36-year NASA career as a veteran of three spacewalks with more than 48 days of spaceflight experience. Robinson will become a professor at the University of California at Davis in the fall of 2012. His last day at NASA was June 30. Robinson began work with NASA as a cooperative education student in 1975 at the agency’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. He was selected for the astronaut corps in 1995. Robinson served as a mission specialist on four spaceflights, including space shuttle missions STS-85 in 1997, STS-95 in 1998, STS-114 in 2005 and STS-130 in 2010. On his second spaceflight, Robinson was one of Sen. John Glenn’s crewmates during Glenn’s historic return to space after 36 years. [adrotate banner="1"] His third flight was NASA’s 2005 return to flight mission after the loss of shuttle Columbia in February 2003. During STS-114, Robinson performed the only in-flight spacewalk to repair of a shuttle’s heat-shield. During his final spaceflight, Robinson orchestrated [...]

• NASA’S Fermi Detects The Highest-Energy Light From A Solar Flare

  11 June 2012

  

  WASHINGTON — During a powerful solar blast on March 7, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected the highest-energy light ever associated with an eruption on the sun. The discovery heralds Fermi’s new role as a solar observatory, a powerful new tool for understanding solar outbursts during the sun’s maximum period of activity. A solar flare is an explosive blast of light and charged particles. The powerful March 7 flare, which earned a classification of X5.4 based on the peak intensity of its X-rays, is the strongest eruption so far observed by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT). The flare produced such an outpouring of gamma rays — a form of light with even greater energy than X-rays — that the sun briefly became the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky. [adrotate banner="1"] “For most of Fermi’s four years in orbit, its LAT saw the sun as a faint, steady gamma-ray source thanks to the impacts of high-speed particles called cosmic rays,” said Nicola Omodei, an astrophysicist at Stanford University in California. “Now we’re beginning to see [...]

• Phobos Grunt Mars Probe killed by a software glitch…maybe

  12 February 2012

  

  The ambitious Russian Mars probe which was supposed to place a lander on Phobos was doomed by a software glitch say Russian officials. “a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of an onboard computer,” according to RIA Novosti. With both of the main spacecraft computers down the doomed probe basically lost it’s mind. Even with that after the reboot the probe’s design still should have allow communication to be re-established. All satellites are normally designed to survive a computer reboot and will come back in a safe mode waiting for commands from the ground. This admission by Russian officials confirms and editoral published here on KnowledgeOrb which said the root cause of the failure  was not the the hardware or software but the state of the Russian space program itself. [adrotate banner="1"] Shortly after the November launch of Phobos Grunt it was supposed to fire its thrusters and start it’s trip to mars. This never happened, the probe lost contact with the ground and it now appears that due [...]

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