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Tuesday’s CSExtra offers a roundup of news about space activities from around the world. The launching Wednesday of NASA’s shuttle Discovery on a final mission is a popular topic, as is Robonaut 2, a humanoid passenger. At MIT, scientists prepare instrumentation for a future Mars mission that could decode DNA. China’s Long March rocket sets a national record for launches. And more.
1. From Spaceflightnow.com: On Monday, NASA mission managers cleared the shuttle Discovery for a Wednesday launch attempt at 3:52 p.m. EDT. Discovery’s final scheduled mission will deliver an equipment storage module to the International Space Station over an 11-day mission. Wednesday’s forecast includes a 70 percent chance of favorable weather. Spaceflightnow.com offers a lengthy look at the flight and Discovery’s long history of service to space exploration.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts133/101101preview/index.html
A. From the Wall Street Journal: The shuttle Discovery’s “crew” includes the first humanoid, Robonaut 2, robot developed by General Motors in collaboration with NASA. R2 will help the company advance its work with crash avoidance systems and automated assembly systems, according to the Wall Street Journal.
http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2010/11/01/general-motors-robot-r2-set-for-blast-off-wednesday/?KEYWORDS=NASA
B. From Florida Today: Discovery will be the first of NASA’s three shuttle orbiters assigned to museum duty, following a challenging final mission.
http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20101102/NEWS02/11020318/Orbital+veterans+poised+to+fly+again
C. From the Orlando Sentinel.com: Discovery to lift off Wednesday in her best structural shape ever. Discovery may be headed into retirement, but the thermal protection system has been upgraded, among other modifications to make the ship safer and more productive. The investments were part of a NASA commitment to keep the improvements coming, and the last flight the best one, according to John Shannon, the NASA shuttle program manager.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/os-nasa-improved-discovery-20101101,0,2659502.story
D. From the Associated Press via National Public Radio: Discovery’s Robonaut 2 is poised to become the first of his kind to soar into space. R2 will become a long term resident of the International Space Station, where it will under go tests to determine its suitability to work with astronauts outside as well as inside the outpost.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130980075
2. From the New York Times: Engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center tackle Project M, a bid to send a humanoid robot to the moon at a cost much less than the expense of sending the Apollo astronauts decades ago. However, the moon has fallen out of favor with the Obama Administration as a destination for exploration. Even at NASA, Program M has generated little enthusiasm outside the small team who envisioned reaching the moon within 1,000 days.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/science/space/02robot.html?_r=2&ref=science
3. From Discovery.com: At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists are devising a way to unravel DNA found on a future NASA mission that will fly to Mars. They suspect that any dust swept up in the atmosphere of Mars can be decoded at the Red Planet with the Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes (SETG) instrument. It will fly as part of a joint NASA/European Space Agency Mars mission in 2018. SETG could help experts determine if Martian DNA originated on the Earth.
http://news.discovery.com/space/mars-dna-earth-life.html
4. From Spaceflightnow.com: China sets a new national record for numbers of Long March launches in one year, 12.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1011/01china/
5. From The Coalition for Space Exploration: NASA’s Epoxi1 mission will swing within 435 miles of the comet Hartley 2 on Thursday.
http://www.exploredeepspace.com/blog/this-week-a-comet-close-up
6. From the Space Review.com: In “Bigelow Still Thinks Big,” Editor Jeff Foust examines efforts by Robert Bigelow, of Las Vegas, to develop commercial orbital habitats using NASA inflatable technologies. So, far Bigelow has marketed the Sundancer and BA 330 habitats to commercial customers, academia and sovereign governments abroad. However, at last month’s International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, N.M. he unveiled the BA 2100, the largest version yet.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1719/1
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