Balls Out In Space

Welcome to BOIS

 

The goal of Balls Out in Space is to launch the smallest satellite which can sustain two-way communications, and to accomplish this in the 191X decade.

After that, we hope to send one ore more robots to the moon well before the end of the decade.

Contact dav3kell@gmail.com if you'd like to be an active are passive participant in this exciting endeavor.

BOIS, a non-profit organization, is now accepting grants, donations, and commitments to make future donations. Contributors will be highly publicized, unless, of course, they wish to remain anonymous.

Throughout the decade, space exploration items of interest, and sometimes simply way-out things, will be posted here.

Balls Out in Space [BOIS]

Jack Horkheimer passes at 72

From the Miami Herald:

Jack Horkheimer, Public Television's ``Star Gazer,'' died Friday afternoon of a respiratory ailment, according to a spokesman for the Miami Museum of Science and Space Transit Planetarium.

See the Wikipedia entry.

I used to stay up late, after the news, to watch Jack explain what we could see in the sky the next evening.

He said his motive was to present a little celestial hors d'oeuvre, wheting our appetite to learn more.

ISS with Atlantis docked passing over Atlanta 9:14-9:17pm Tuesday

The ISS (with the Atlantis shuttle docked) could be easily seen with the naked eye passing from WNW to SSE through a clear night sky.

While it looks like a small spec in the captured frame, it was quite bright and easy to follow as it moved across the sky.

While it came in at 39 degrees and left at 16 degrees, it was at 50-60 degrees elevation near the mid-point of its path across the sky, appearing to pass over the moon (like the proverbial cow). This is the result of its elliptical orbit.

I hope to post a short video clip giving those who have never seen it an idea of how fast it is moving. It cut across our viewing plane in 3 minutes. It's traveling at 17,500 mph. 

 

Earliest shuttle landing opportunity is 8:51 a.m. EDT Monday

The shuttle separated from the Station beginning 8:52 a.m. EDT, flew around it at a distance of 660 ft, then did a retrograde burst to spread itself apart from the Station.

The heat shield has been found in good shape for landing.

Depending upon the weather, it could touch down at KSC as early as 8:51 a.m. EDT Monday.

Follow the mission status at SpaceFlightNow.com

If it lands at the earliest opportunity, it will fly over the US from British Columbia:

 

Satellite view of volcano in Iceland

From Wired

Live video of shuttle circling station

You can see some awesome video of the space shuttle (Discovery STS-131) circling the International Space Station from 660 feet away (with the Southern Ocean in the background, about 224 miles away) as this is typed (10am, Saturday, 4/17/2010) at SpaceFlightNow.com

There will not be many more Shuttle mission, so you will not get many more opportunities to see this.

It's about to enter the darkness, and we might see a sunrise later.

 

Bradley Observatory Plaza

Since we should be familiar with the neighborhood in which we live, there will be a test on this in three hours.

 

Click on the continuation to see the words on the left side, if you can't read them above.

If this is of interest to you, you'll also be interested in the Metro Atlanta Solar System, which helps those familiar with the metro Atlanta area understand the relative distances between the Sun and the planets.

Discovery poised for 6:21am EDT Monday launch

 

Follow the countdown here.

Show you love NASA

Get a breast tattoo, like Jenny Wadley did. (This is her Twitter profile image.)

 

NASA radar finds water ice on the moon. I'll have mine on the rocks.

 From the Sidney Morning Herald

A US radar launched into orbit aboard an Indian spacecraft has detected craters filled with ice on the moon's north pole, NASA says.

The US space agency's Mini-SAR radar found more than 40 small craters ranging in diameter from 1.6 to 15 kilometres, each full of water ice.

''Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness, it's estimated there could be at least 600 million tonnes of water ice,'' NASA said in a statement.

The finding came weeks after the US President, Barack Obama, halted US ambitions to return astronauts to the moon.

Earth as seen from space

Gizmodo shows the highest resolution images of the entire globe (eastern and western hemisphere) yet:

 

This image is only about 3/4 the resolution you'll see at the site: