On this date 45 years ago, (January 27, 1967) the space program lost three of its finest in a tragic cabin fire of Apollo 1.
Apollo 1 was to be the first manned mission of the series of missions that would take the US to moon.
Lost that day, but not forgotten:
Command Pilot: Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom
Senior Pilot: Edward H. White II
Pilot: Roger B. Chaffee
Click here to view the embedded video.
Bravo Canadians Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammad for sending a man into space on a low budget. Ok so it’s a LEGO man, but it’s a start!
The Blue Marble from the new Suomi NPP satellite. Click for a larger version - more versions linked below. Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
Just have a look at this amazing image of us from one of our newest satellites!
A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012. The NPP satellite was renamed ‘Suomi NPP’ on January 24, 2012 to honor the late Verner E. Suomi of the University of Wisconsin.
Suomi NPP is NASA’s next Earth-observing research satellite. It is the first of a new generation of satellites that will observe many facets of our changing Earth.
Suomi NPP is carrying five instruments on board. The biggest and most important instrument is The Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite or VIIRS.
To read more about NASA’s Suomi NPP go to: http://npp.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.html
Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
You can see other sized versions of this image here at full resolution, I’m putting this on my desktop for sure.
Peanut butter and jelly. Salt and pepper. Cookies and milk. Heidi Klum and Seal. Excluding that last pair, some things just go together and form a comforting bedrock on which we can rely.
[caption image="http://cs.astronomy.com/asycs/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/astronomy.Misc/0647.STONYVINO01sm.jpg" targeturl="http://cs.astronomy.com/asycs/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/astronomy.Misc/3386.STONYVINO01lg.jpg"]A 160-gram (5.64 ounces) meteorite from the Campo del Cielo fall in Argentina failed to replicate the smooth-tasting promise of Meterito, the world’s first wine aged with a genuine meteorite. Chris Raymond photo[/caption]So how about meteorites and wine? Sounds crazy, sure, but nattering nabobs probably said the same thing after some cave-mom first slapped some peanut butter on her cave-kid’s jelly sammich, too. You just never know, which is why Meterito, the world’s first wine aged with a genuine meteorite, intrigues me.
The brainchild of English astronomer Ian Hutcheon, who works in Chile at the Centro Astronomico Tagua Tagua, an observatory he founded in 2007, Meterito is a Cabernet-Sauvignon crafted from grapes grown at Hutcheon’s Tremont Vineyard outside Santiago, Chile. After fermentation, the wine spent 12 months in a wooden barrel containing a genuine three-inch chunk of a meteorite that crashed into Chile’s Atacama Desert some 6,000 years ago, according to an article by The Drinks Business.
After a year of swirling around the meteorite and picking up all of its tasty 4.5-billion-year-old goodness, Hutcheon blended the wine with another batch of Cabernet-Sauvignon before bottling about 10,000 liters [2,642 gallons]. Unfortunately, you won’t find a bottle at your local shop yet; it’s only available at Hutcheon’s observatory right now, but he does hope to export it.
Inspired, I attempted to avoid the middleman and create my own “secret solar system sauce” at home last night. After pouring a bit of Cupcake Vineyard’s Red Velvet into a glass, I gently placed a 160-gram (5.64 ounces) meteorite from my collection into the vessel — a piece of the Campo del Cielo fall discovered in 1576 in Argentina. Unfortunately, due to my natural impatience, I started fidgeting after only five minutes as I perched over the glass, staring in anticipation of a visual vinification miracle. Deciding there was no way I could wait 12 months, I slammed the vino, gagged on the harsh iron taste my meteorite created, and cursed Hutcheon.
Until I score a bottle of Meterito, the jury’s still out on whether meteorites and wine were meant for each other.
Click here to view the embedded video.
A good preview of ESA missions with (IMHO) terrible audio quality. I thought it was just the version I was watching but no, they are all the same.
Audio aside, I can’t wait to see that Vega launch coming right up on February 9, the VV01 as it is called is going to carry nine satellites into orbit including seven CubeSats from European universities.
I love the CubeSats. Typically they are a 10 cm cube, that’s 3.9 inches in the US and they weigh in at about 1.33 kg or 2.9 lbs. They give a platform for students to perform space science experiments and exploration. CubeSats have been built by academia as they utilize off-the-shelf electronics. Several companies have built CubeSats including Boeing, builders of “regular” satellites. CubeSats are very popular and provide a nice fit with the ham radio crowd too, of which I am happy to say I belong.
BTW: I’ve been hearing the aurora was very nice last night, I was clouded in so I can’t say. Hard to believe as the K indices were not that high, it could be the reports were originating in very high latitudes though.