Bit by bit, the new rocket ship that is supposed to blast America into the second Space Age and return astronauts to the moon appears to be coming undone. First was the discovery that it lacked sufficient power to lift astronauts in a state-of-the-art capsule into orbit. Then engineers found out that it might vibrate like a giant tuning fork, shaking its crew to death.
Now, in the latest setback to the Ares I, computer models show the ship could crash into its launch tower during liftoff. An Orlando Sentinel article about the Ares program quotes an unidentified NASA employee as saying, “I get the impression that things are quickly going from bad to worse to unrecoverable.”
Browsing Posts tagged Space
Via slashdot – a Register article about the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) that will be built in Chile and send data to the U.S. How much data? They are thinking it will be around 30 Terabytes a night.
What caught my eye and quite frankly surprised me, was the last paragraph
The data reduction pipelines are developed in C++ and Python. They rely on approximately 30 off-the-shelf middleware packages/libraries for parallel processing, data persistence and retrieval, data transfer, visualization, operations management and control, and security. The current design is based on MySQL layered on a parallel, fault-tolerant file system.
NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Telescope successfully launched aboard a Delta II rocket June 11. The spacecraft will study the highest-energy form of light, helping scientists to answer questions about supermassive black hole systems, pulsars and the origin of cosmic rays. GLAST is a powerful space observatory that will explore the most extreme environments in the universe, and search for signs of new laws of physics and what composes the mysterious dark matter, explain how black holes accelerate immense jets of material to nearly light speed, and help crack the mysteries of the staggeringly powerful explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.
