Let the rovers roll! The European Space Agency has announced its first Aurora Program mission, and it’s called ExoMars. The goal is to search for evidence of past and present life in samples from the top 2 meters of Martian surface. This is a rover that carries around a laboratory platform. In looking for Extant […]

As Pamela mentioned earlier, I get to spend today at the Johnson Space Centre Museum. It’s not as good as seeing the shuttle launch with Scott, but it’s a really close second – I’m sure not complaining. Talk about chances to geek out.
Pamela dropped me off here just before they opened at 10am. After paying […]

This morning I’m attending an educators workshop at the Lunar and Planetary Institute on “Returning to the Moon.” At 8:45am on a Sunday I find my self in a room packed with formal educators, EPO professionals (that’s my category today), and coffee (sometimes the coffee gets high billing to). This forum has a neat multi-pronged […]

I am reporting from the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. I’ll be attending press conferences and talking to astronomers, and blogging madly about all this.
Right after the Hubble press conference, astronaut John Grunsfeld — who is the leader of the astronauts’ Hubble extravehicular activities — showed us a spacesuit glove. I tried it […]

Unlike most satellites orbiting the Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope was designed to be periodically upgraded, serviced by the Space Shuttle. This allows astronomers and engineers to keep the technology on the grand old ’scope up to date. This year, NASA plans on servicing the Hubble Space Telescope for the very last time. A full […]

Although the space shuttles have a busy schedule completing the construction of the International Space Station, there’s one other job to complete - servicing the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA officials announced the details of the mission today at the Winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. If all goes well, the space shuttle Atlantis will […]

For my entire professional astronomer life, Hubble has been there as a beloved icon of what scientists can accomplish technically and scientifically when they are given the opportunity to dream. The images most of us think of when we pull up a mental image of the universe came from Hubble: The Whirlpool, The Pillars of […]