Welcome back Atlantis!

Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center, tomorrow at 10am eastern time, after a wildly successful mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

Happy Sunday.

Music; bringing the world together.

According to this Google Trends search, the top ten google searches (excluding Google itself) are as follows:

1. Flu

2. Swine Flu

3. Star Trek

4. Rihanna

5. California

6. Biggest Loser

7. Prejean

8. Miss California

9. American Idol

10. Obama

This is strange. Very strange.

Sts-125 Solar Transit

What you are seeing is a pretty awesome picture of the Space Shuttle Atlantis mid-transit (that is, gliding in front of the sun) before it captured the Hubble Space Telescope.  You can see both the Shuttle and Hubble in the following picture.

This is the first time the Shuttle and Hubble have been resolved in front of the sun. Wow.

The (short) life of an Asteroid

Check this awesome animation out.

If you hold a penny in one hand, and a grain of sand in the other, and extend your arms as far away from each other as you can, you will get a somewhat accurate replica of earth’s size and distance from the sun (the penny).

If you shrunk all of the stars down to grains of sand, they would stand roughly 6 miles apart.

Funny motivational posters

In search of Beauty…

I saw this and it made me smile. I hope it does the same for you! Fran and Mario Cowen, live from the Mayo Clinic atrium.

Atlantis Update!

So, today, astronauts on board Atlantis will attempt to grab the Hubble Space Telescope with the shuttle’s robotic arm, and move it into the shuttle’s cargo bay.

A few dinged thermal tiles that form the ablative heat shield were identified on the bottom of the shuttle, but have been deemed not a threat to the shuttle or crew. The tiles are placed on the bottom half of the shuttle to absorb and deflect heat caused by friction during retrograde (re-entry). Since the Columbia disaster, NASA has made it standard practice to photograph and inspect the shield after each launch. This process is actually quite beautiful, as the shuttle has to rotate 360 degrees while in orbit, to give the camera (typically on the ISS) a complete view of the shuttle’s external surfaces.

Here’s a video:

Also, something pretty awesome happened on Tuesday, the first Tweet from Space happened! Astronaut Mike Massimino aka @astro_mike Tweeted the following:

From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!

We sure have come a long ways from the years of radio silence and satellite delay. Even though the Space station doesn’t have a constant Internet connection… soon though, soon.

We really need to prioritize our fears.

Above is a Google Trends graph, comparing the search volumes between Swine flu (in blue) and ZOMBIES (in red). We are clearly confused as to the real threat to humanity.