[UPDATE: ISS has captured the Dragon!

That's not a sim! That's the Dragon capsule held by the ISS robot arm, 30 minutes after capture. See the notes below.]

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The SpaceX Dragon capsule is currently on approach to the International Space Station. As I write this (13:00 UTC) it is about 50 meters away and moving in. NASA has a live feed that I am embedding here:

You may need to refresh this page to see it.

Dragon had approached to 30 meters, but a glitch made NASA ask for it to back off to 70 meters. Dragon uses a laser ranging device called LIDAR to determine its position and velocity relative to ISS. It was getting a stray reflection from a structure on ISS that was giving it bad data. The problem was quickly fixed by narrowing he LIDAR’s field of view, excluding the stray reflection. Clever.

Dragon and ISS need to be in daylight for the astronauts to be able to grapple the capsule with the robot arm. That time is currently scheduled for 14:40 UTC (10:40 a.m. Eastern US time).

I will update this post as new info comes in.

[UPDATE 1 (13:22 UTC): Here's a frame grab of the Dragon as it holds 30 meters from ISS. The shadow of one of the station's solar panels is across the capsule. Lovely!]

[UPDATE 2 13:30 UTC): Another pretty shot of the Dragon capsule, this time with part of the station as well. This is a screen grab of the live NASA video stream from 14:30 UTC. Dragon is moving from 30 meters to 10 meters from ISS, where it will once again hold. At that distance, the robot arm will be able to grapple the capsule. It should reach that point around 13:55 UTC.]

[UPDATE 3 (14:38 UTC): NASA expects Dragon will reach 10 meter hold position at 13:45. The first opportunity to grapple it with the robot arm is at 14:02 UTC, which is when the pair will be in the dark. A second opportunity is at 14:28 when they are in daylight once again.]

[UPDATE 4 (13:50 UTC): We are GO for capture! Dragon is 10 meters from ISS, and they will use the robot arm in a few minutes to grapple the capsule. This shot grabbed from the live feed shows Dragon as it holds position off the ISS.]

[UPDATE 5 (13:58 UTC): CAPTURE! At 13:56 UTC history was made as the Canadian robot arm of the International Space Space grappled the SpaceX Dragon capsule, making it the first privately-owned commercial spacecraft to connect with ISS. Congrats to NASA and SpaceX for this wonderful moment. Next step: bring it in and mate it to the docking berth on the Harmony node of ISS.]

Just a quick update: a new series of pictures of the Dragon capsule as seen by astronauts aboard the International Space Station has just been released, and they’re way cool. Here’s one:

[Click to embiggen.]

Earlier today, Dragon passed just 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) from the station, performing a series of tasks to make sure it was ready to dock with ISS tomorrow. I’m sure the folks at SpaceX are poring over these images to make sure their capsule’s OK. And of course, tomorrow we’ll get even more dramatic images and video!

Image credit: NASA

It’s a tough time to be a science fiction hero. Just look at the headlines for proof!

First, there’s this:

Honestly, that’s not surprising. He does seem to get into trouble wherever he goes. So misunderstood. But it would’ve been interesting to know where the TARDIS materialized in that situation.

This next one though is clearly her own fault:

Not that I blame her. I’ve spent many an hour alone in an observatory, and I imagine the Astrometrics Lab on Voyager wasn’t that much more entertaining. Hey Janeway, maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you had let her use the Holodeck more!

Tip o’ the sonic screwdriver to my sister Marci, and to Jeri Ryan on G+ who linked to Kevin Hanning’s post. And yes, those are real headlines.

Early this morning, the SpaceX Dragon capsule passed just 2.4 kilometers below the International Space Station, completing another critical step in its mission profile that’ll lead to it docking with the orbiting station Friday morning.

From the station, astronauts captured video as the capsule cruised by:

[You may need to refresh this page to see the video load.]

Very, very cool. You can see the Dragon capsule in this video frame grab: it’s in the lower left corner, silhouetted against the Earth. The extended solar panels are obvious, and you can just make out the shape of the capsule itself.

This flyby was an important milestone, since it showed that the capsule could approach the station and also abort the approach if needed. Other key elements it demonstrated were that it could float freely (as it will have to when it docks with ISS), that its proximity sensors worked, and that its GPS was operational as well. Astronauts on the ISS were also able to command a strobe light remotely, confirming they could link to the capsule.

All this leads up to the big show on Friday: docking. At about 09:00 UTC (05:00 Eastern US time), NASA will decide if the capsule is ready to approach. If so, over the course of an hour or two it will come with 250 meters of the station. It will then perform some last maneuvers to prove it’s ready to go, and then it will make its final approach.

Then, around 13:00 UTC, it will come within just a few meters of ISS, and astronauts on board will grab it with the robotic arm, bringing it in to mate. After that, there will be quite a few checks done which will take some time, leading up to the hatch being opened Saturday morning, scheduled to happen around 11:00 UTC.

All the fun stuff so far has been happening in the middle of the night for me in Boulder, but the approach tomorrow morning isn’t too bad. I’ll get up a little early to watch it live (06:00? We’ll see). I’ll live-tweet the events as they happen.

This is all very exciting! The capsule has been performing essentially flawlessly since launch, so I have high hopes for the next few days.

Image credit: NASA

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Related Posts:

- SpaceX Dragon on its way to the ISS!
- Space X set to launch on Saturday May 19

Someday, Mars will stop surprising me.

Today is not that day.

The image below was taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been taking devastatingly high-res pictures of the Red Planet for many years. While passing over the edge of the Tharsis Shield — a huge uplifted region of Mars home to its four gigantic volcanoes –it saw this bizarre fieldof craters:

[Click to hephaestenate.]

First, you may think these are mounds and not craters, but that’s an illusion. Our brain uses illumination to gauge up and down in pictures like these, and assumes the sunlight is coming from above. However, these really are craters, but the illumination is coming from below — north is roughly toward the top of the picture and the crater field is at a northern latitude of about 50°. Flip the picture over if it helps (I’ll be honest, even doing that makes it hard for me to see these as other than mounds; confounded brain!). You can see more examples of this illusion here, here, and here.

But that’s not the weirdest thing about these craters. What’s really odd is they aren’t circular! Impacts are generally round unless 1) the impact is at a very shallow angle, b) the terrain suddenly goes from one kind of material to another, creating a discontinuity, or γ) something happened after the crater was formed to distort it.

A shallow-angle impact is almost certainly not the case here, since there are so many craters spread out over the region that an incoming object would’ve had to break up into a gazillion pieces, all of which came in at that angle. Not impossible, but it seems unlikely.

The changing terrain idea doesn’t work, since again the craters are spread out over the area. You might see one crater with a sudden break in its rim or change in shape, but dozens? Spread out in all directions? Nope.

That leaves after effects, and in this case we have two more clues. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve posted a lot of stuff about Sunday’s annular eclipse (see Related Links below), and I figured I was done… but then I got a pretty remarkable picture sent to me.

During the eclipse, in northern California, two men sent a small (6 cubic meter) helium-filled balloon up to 90,000 feet (roughly 27 km). Equipped with a camera and an ingenious system that used puffs of gas to orient the payload, they took this pretty amazing shot of the eclipse:

[Click to penumbrenate.]

That’s the Earth on the left (duh), and on the upper right you can see the eclipsed Sun! They used a solar filter to cover half the camera’s view so that they could get the correct exposure for both the Earth and the much brighter Sun.

I really enjoyed reading their story on how they set this up and executed it. I especially liked how they launched, sat around to watch the eclipse itself, then set off to find the balloon once it came back down (shredded after it popped at its lofty apex).

I love stuff like this! Basic equipment, clever people, and a can-do attitude results in something remarkable. Well done!

P.S. My friend and fellow Boulder astronomer Stuart Robbins posted a series of lovely timed sequences from the eclipse that he took in Albuquerque. It’s well worth a click!

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Related Posts:

- A fake and a real view of the solar eclipse… FROM SPACE!
- Gallery: When the Moon ate (most of) the Sun
- The May 20, 2012 annular solar eclipse in motion
- Followup: Supereclipse

Via my pal Miss Cellania (possibly not her real name) at Neatorama, I saw this short cat video which is really pretty funny:

Ha! This is a great example of audio pareidolia; hearing (instead of seeing, as it’s usually done) some recognizable pattern in a completely unrelated series of noises. It helps a lot if you’re cued in some way to hear it with subtitles. In this case the title of the Neatorama post had me listening for the words "I don’t want to", but I think I would’ve heard it anyway.

But I wonder: if they were going to a dispensary and asked the cat what they were getting, would you hear "marijuana"?

Check out the posts below for more of this sort of thing. The first one still makes me laugh.

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Related Posts:

- It’s Caturday? NONONONO.
- Ba? Fa!
- The hallmark of a black hole
- Carmina Buraneidolia