Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

The anniversary of the first moon landing, on July 20, 1969, is always a special occasion for me. It’s my dad’s birthday too, and he was a NASA employee for over 30 years, so the story of the space program is the story of my childhood. I was too young to watch any of the [...]

The Bad Astronomer (fellow UVA alum Phil Plait) points to a really spectacular Hubble image of an unusual spiral galaxy. For me, the takeaway is when you look at the really big version of the image (not the 28 MB one but the 4.3 MB one) and look at all the background galaxies. Not stars, [...]

I had read about NASA’s use of Snoopy and the Peanuts characters as unofficial mascots for Apollo 10 (it was well documented in Charlie Brown and Charlie Schulz, which sat on my Pop-Pop’s bookshelf alongside the Peanuts Treasury), but don’t remember seeing this. Courtesy Google Image Search and the LIFE archives:

As good an argument for [...]

I couldn’t be happier about today’s decision to mount a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. When one considers how much that instrument has pushed back the frontiers of our knowledge, ruling out a repair mission when a safety protocol exists seems unnecessarily cautious. Here’s to a minimum of seven more years of Hubble [...]

My dad called me last night and said, “What about our boy Steve?” I was confused, and so he had to point out that the astronaut who successfully performed the spacewalk to remove the dangling filler cloth on Discovery is none other than Steve Robinson, former chief of the Experimental Flow Physics Branch at NASA’s [...]

I love this story about the discovery of spacesuits for spies (or, less sensationally, training suits from the Air Force’s short-lived MH-7 program) in a locked, forgotten room at Cape Canaveral. As a comment on Slashdot pointed out, it’s a great metaphor for the fate of much of our space engineering work from the 1960s.
A [...]

I have been meaning for a while to post about Cassini, the orbiter that is currently approaching Saturn orbit carrying one of the most sophisticated arrays of imaging equipment ever fielded. What finally prompted me was my finding the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) photo blog. All the photos taken by the orbiter [...]

The hypersonic test flight of the X-43A, NASA’s scramjet test plane, had special significance for our family. My dad was working on the program that produced the engine while he was in research at NASA. His part was subtle but important: how do you figure out if your engine is running hot (or cold, or [...]

Alarming, this finding from Cornell that the landing site of the Spirit, in the Gusev crater on Mars, was warmer yesterday afternoon than 14 major points in the Northeast. For the record, the landing site was 12° F, while the warmest city noted, Providence, RI, was only 9° F, while of course Mount Washington, NH, [...]

You’ll have to forgive the highly Americentric tone of the headline, but when I saw that NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover “Spirit” landed safely tonight, just over a week after Europe’s Beagle 2 disappeared after its descent to the Red Planet, I had to let out a cheer. Just remember: I’m a child of NASA, and [...]

I was unable to speak or think past my grief yesterday. I was on my way to a choral practice when I happened to switch on NPR and heard the news. During a break, I used the library’s computers and got the story from Dave. Of course the first thought that went through my mind [...]

Washington Post: Hubble Photo Shows 3000 More Galaxies. Pointing the camera at two previously blank spots of sky, the camera discovered about 1500 galaxies in each one. “Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space,” indeed.more…