After being held up a day due to bad weather in Florida, space shuttle Discovery soared across the Pacific and over Southern California, going through a route just north of Los Angelese before touching down on Edwards Air Force Base. The flight path was egregiously adjusted due to safety considerations, particularly after the Columbia disaster, but this time around, there were no problems as the shuttle began enduring the period of maximum heating (roughly 20 minutes before landing).

The mission to remove the two pieces of protruding filler on the Discovery belly was a success: Stephen Robinson, a mechanical engineer, only needed a few seconds to pull out each dangling piece of ceramic-fiber cloth.  However, just as this issue was solved, NASA scientists were busy trying to determine whether or not something needs to be done about a thermal blanket below the commander's window. It turns out that blanket was nicked by some debris during the launch. Some air probably got into the opening and puffed up the blanket. NASA is concerned that during the shuttle re-entry into atmosphere, the blanket might come off and smack into the shuttle.

NASA astronaut Stephen Robinson has to complete a difficult mission to remove a couple of short pieces of filler material that are sticking out of space shuttle Discovery. These emergency repairs are to mitigate NASA concerns that Discovery might overheat if it descends through the atmosphere with the material protruding.

During the lift-off of the Discovery shuttle, a large piece of foam broke from the shuttle's external tank - this was a bit of a surprise, given the years of work devoted exactly to avoid this shedding in the wake of the Columbia disaster.  As a result, NASA decided to indefinitely suspend further flights until further notice.  A similar foam break damaged the wing of Columbia during its launch, and subsequently caused that shuttle's disintegration during its reentry into the atmosphere in 2003.  Despite that, the Discovery is OK, and there was no observable damage caused this time around, and NASA hopes shuttle flights will be resumed quickly.

Despite the sensor problem, it seems that NASA is still going ahead with the launch of space shuttle Discovery.  The space agency believes it has fixed the fuel sensor issue that delayed the original departure originally scheduled for June 13th.  I hope all goes according to plan - if so, then liftoff is expected around 10:40 AM today (July 26th). 

Here are a couple sites to watch the launch from:  NASA Television (with help from Yahoo! and Akamai) will have a live streaming webcast, whereas AOL's Research and Learn page will have live video coverage with four different views.

Scientists have been able to capture some pretty unique images of a radiation belt inside the rings of Saturn.  They have been able to obtain one of the sharpest pictures of the planet's giant magnetosphere, and to also study in more detail the planet's rings.  Some of those images have revealed the presence of some faint rings, which may possibly indicate some previously unseen moons.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint project that counts with the efforts of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.  Caltech's JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) manages the mission for NASA and also designed the Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras.  The Cassini spacecraft entered Saturn's orbit in July of last year, kicking off a four year study of the planet.   

The Cassini spacecraft is making today a closer approach towards Titan, the moon from Saturn that has not ceased to fascinate astronomers. The probe is expected to be roughly 1,200 km from Titan's surface and will be hopefully able to penetrate the satellite's dense orange haze. Later, in January 2005, the Huygens probe is expected to be released from Cassini and enter Titan's atmosphere, carrying out various science tasks right at the surface - if it can survive the landing.  NASA will be releasing new photos as they become available via the following link. 

It's official - SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize today, breaking through the Earth's atmosphere to the edge of space for the second time in five days.  The US-built craft is the world's first privately built manned spacecraft to have completed its third round-trip journey to space (besides the two over the past week, it had previously achieved the feat earlier in the summer).  Hopefully, the Ansari contest will further bolster dreams of private space exploration and open the final frontier to tourists at large.

Note: The da Vinci Project, one of the Canadian entries in the contest, is planning to still go ahead with the launch of its rocket from Kindersley, Saskatchewan later this month.  It is nice to see the Canadians involved in this venture persevere, and I hope they achieve their goal to soar past the Earth's atmosphere.

Last week, SpaceShipOne (the entry funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen) made the headlines by successfully completing one of the required two flights to win the coveted Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award conferred to the first privately developed manned rocket to reach space twice within a two week time window.  The spaceship can win it all if its scheduled launch tomorrow is successful and it reaches an altitude of at least 98km for the second time since September 29th.  Tomorrow's mission timeline is as follows:

* Takeoff at 7am PT

* Ignition at 8am PT

* Landing at 8:30am PT

* Press Conference to announce official Altitude at 10:30am PT

The flight and press conference an be viewed live at: http://www.xprize.org

On the hunt for the coveted Ansari X Prize, one of the Canadian entries (the da Vinci project) announced last Friday that it was postponing its October 2nd launch.  The delay was caused by an inability to obtain a special material necessary to make two key parts.  This temporary halt means that Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne, due to launch from California's Mojave Desert on Wednesday.  If the spaceship can repeat the same feat (i.e. reach an altitude of 62 miles or 100 kilometers) twice in a two-week time frame, it will capture the $10 million prize purse.

The Labor Day long weekend meant a car trip from Toronto to Chicago and the fulfillment of a long-overdue promise to my wife to visit the Windy City. Walking back to our hotel tonight, we passed by WGN Radio (the home of the Chicago Cubs on Michigan Avenue). The station had a nice display about the NASA mission to the moon in July of 1969, when Aldrin and Armstrong spent 2.5 hours exploring the lunar surface.

And that was a great intro to a story that I read earlier this weekend, about two astronauts who went on a spacewalk on Friday to plug in new antennas and replace a worn-out piece of cooling equipment.  This is the fourth and final spacewalk of a six-month mission for the current crew of the ISS (International Space Station).  American Michael Fincke and Russian commander Gennady Padalka will be replaced by a crew next month. The antennas will guide a new unmanned cargo ship built by the European Space Agency that will be launched to the ISS in late 2005.  Incredible how much science and space travel have evolved since 1969!

Two important discoveries about the Red Planet were made earlier this week by the NASA twin rovers.  The Spirit rover found additional signs that water might have once existed in Mars.  The rover's twin (Opportunity) discovered a field of dunes inside a crater.

The robotic vehicles landed in January and first uncovered signs in March that Mars had water at one point in its history. The Spirit rover has now explored nearly two miles across the plains of its Gusev Crater landing site and into an area called the Columbia Hills. The rover recently found indications water had changed an outcropping of bedrock dubbed Clovis, NASA scientists claimed. The research indicates that the interaction with liquid water changed the composition of the rock - a fascinating proof that water might have once existed in Mars.

After the success of the Spaceship One mission (which was documented here in May), some wondered which other contestants could contend for the coveted Ansari X Prize.  Well, one of these contenders is an entry from Canada: the Canadian Arrow project.

Yesterday, the Arrow team completed a successful test run of part of their spaceship.  From a height of 2.4 kilometers, the Canadian Arrow dropped an unmanned crew cabin from a helicopter.  Then, about five minutes later, the cabin floated safely into the waters of Lake Ontario - just a bit South of the Toronto Island Airport (a smaller airport used only for some domestic flights).

No launch date for the full spaceship (measuring 17 meters) has been set as of yet, but it will probably happen sometime in the fall.  Canada also has another entry in the X Prize contest: the Toronto-based da Vinci project.  The da Vinci team expects to launch its Wild Fire craft on October 2nd, from Kindersley, Saskatchewan.

In other Ansari X Prize news, the Washington State team private unmanned 23-foot-long Rubicon 1 subscale test rocket exploded 200 feet after take off during a flight last week.  No injuries were reported in that test, conducted in an unpopulated area of the Olympic peninsula.

NASA recently released photos from lapetus, Saturn's outermost large two-face moon.  Lapetus has a bright, heavily cratered icy terrain and a dark terrain.  An interesting tidbit on the Cassini mission is that the spacecraft is named after Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who discovered lapetus in 1671.

Since the discovery, scientists have been puzzled by the fact that the moon has two hemispheres: one dark (the side facing forward) and one light (the trailing hemisphere, which reflects about 50 percent of sunlight).  Lapetus always shows the same face to Saturn, and it is hoped that the Cassini mission will be able to finally discover the reason behind the mysterious dichotomy.  One theory is that the dark hemisphere is being coated with particles being ejected from Phoebe, a tiny Saturn moon.

NASA is still tracking one of the strongest space storms on record, as it reaches the edge of the solar system. The solar storms blasted through Earth in late 2003 and according to NASA astronomers, are now some 13 billion kilometers away from the solar system.  The fast and intense flares emanating from the sun began last October and November, sending billions of tons of electrified gas at speeds up to 5 million mph.  These 10 powerful solar flares shot up extreme doses of X-rays and other radiation, along with slower-moving storms of charged particles.  Since that time, the waves have slowed down to a speed of about 1.5 million mph, and according to calculations, should reach Voyager 1 (almost 9 million miles away, representing the furthest located human-made object) sometime late this year or in early 2005. 

NASA released on this past weekend some pretty interesting photos taken from the Cassini spacecraft as it passed by Saturn's big moon named Titan. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.  The cost of the mission, which was launched in 1997, is pegged at $3.3 billion.  There will be a lot more photo opportunities for Cassini to photograph Titan during its four year mission, with an extra estimated 45 more flybys of the moon scheduled (coming within 600 miles of the moon). The Huygens probe will be sent into Titan's atmosphere in January, and will send pictures back to Cassini as it makes its descent by parachute.

SpaceShipOne took an important step yesterday in winning the coveted $10 million Ansari X Prize, an award given to the first privately financed three-seat spacecraft to reach an altitude of 62 miles and repeat the feat within a couple of weeks. The requirements are geared to allow for extra paying customers and reusability of the spaceship, respectively.

Space.com had many articles on the subject today. Pilot Mike Melvill achieved a bit more than 400 feet above the distance considered to be the boundary of space, namely 62.2 miles above the Earth. The flight duration was pegged at roughly 90 minutes. By contrast, in 1961, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, soared to an altitude of 115 miles, although the flight on that occasion only lasted for about 15 minutes.

The rarest of all eclipses took place this past Tuesday, as Venus moved directly between the Earth and the Sun.  Venus makes two passes across the sun, eight years apart, every 122 years.  The next transit is expected to be in 2012. 

NASA created a fantastic site that is highly educative and provides many shots taken by observatories from around the world: 

Venus Transit  2004: Sun - Earth Day

SpaceShipOne, a privately financed passenger carrying sub-orbital RLV (Reusable Launch Vehicle) flew its third powered flight this past Thursday over the Mojave Desert in California.  The vehicle reached an altitude of roughly 65 kilometers during the flight, the highest peak achieved to date.  Some observers believe that Spaceship one will be ready for sub-orbital flights later this summer.