Monthly Archives: June 2006

The official launch countdown for Saturday’s launch of Space Shuttle Discovery and STS-121 began today at 5 p.m. EDT, with the launch clock set at T-43 hours. But for many at NASA, the countdown has been running since last July, when a piece of foam fell off Discovery’s external tank (ET) during launch. NASA managers quickly grounded the entire fleet, including Discovery, barely into her first day in orbit. Continue reading →

The Hubble Space Telescope’s main camera has been offline since Monday, June 19, according to NASA. While scientists aren’t precisely sure why Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) reported invalid data and suspended operation, Ed Ruitberg, acting Hubble Space Telescope operations project manager at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, says engineers have been working to uncover why two of the three detectors in the ACS went into standby—cutting Hubble’s observation capacity in half. Continue reading →

Researchers at IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology announced today that they have surpassed the speed record for silicon-based chips by using a new semiconductor that operates about 250 times faster than those powering chips today. Continue reading →

As seen in Popular Mechanics. Two years after NASA’s Genesis probe failed to deploy her parachute upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, investigators have found the culprit behind the crash: A design flaw resulted in the backwards installation of two … Continue reading →

European scientists unveiled a powerful new employee to help them in this millenium’s take on a space race to Mars and challenge U.S. exploration efforts of the planet: a robotic rover vehicle nicknamed “Bridget.” Continue reading →