Launch Your Face Into Space is a post from Chris Pirillo
If you ever dreamed of exploring space when you were a kid, now is your chance. While you won’t be able to just climb aboard a space shuttle, you can send your face along with the crew. NASA just announced their “Face in Space”program. Upload a photograph and your name (or just your name) and it will wing its way onto the shuttle faster than the speed of light.

Be sure to save your mission information once you have uploaded your picture. After the shuttle lands on Earth, you’ll be able to return to the site and print out a commemorative certificate signed by the Mission Commander. You can also check on mission status, view mission photographs, link to various NASA educational resources and follow the commander and crew on Twitter or Facebook.
I wanted to be an astronaut at one point in my life. Heck, I don’t know too many people who haven’t thought about what it would be like to fly around defying gravity, weaving in and out of stars and checking out what’s really out there. This is the only chance I’m going to get, and you can bet my photo will be aboard that space shuttle. My face will be launching into space on September 16, 2010 on the STS-133 mission.
Social Media Updates for 2010-06-06 is a post from Chris Pirillo
"Active galaxies have bright and sometimes chaotic central region powered by a supermassive black hole that is millions or billions of times the mass of our sun. Astronomers from NASA and MIT think they have found a way to explain the vast zoo of jets coming from the black holes in some of these active galaxies. But wait! (I know you are saying to yourself) nothing can escape a black hole, how can it have jets?! Although nothing can escape from inside a black hole -- not even light -- once it has crossed the event horizon, it's the region just outside that is really interesting to astronomers."
- Jason HuebelOK Go enlist NASA Jet Propulsion Lab staff to produce amazing Rube Goldberg machine music video: http://bit.ly/bdlxay (via @georgey26)
[Direct Link]Exploring @NASA_EO map of sea surface temperatures at the start of 2010 #hurricane season http://bit.ly/9dqzPF #climate
[Direct Link]RT @BadAstronomer: NASA flies giant telescope that looks at the sky through a hole cut out of the side of a 747. Srsly. http://is.gd/ctwCE
Oh, this isn't an ESPN 3 publicity stunt? Go figure.
- Mark Krynsky'World's largest' airship inflated in colossal Alabama cowshed - http://is.gd/copMW
The "world's largest airship" - according to its makers - was inflated for the first time yesterday and is undergoing ground tests inside a mighty roofed exhibition hall in Alabama which in normal times offers "the space for 1500 cattle".…
RT @AlexBerger Woot! @NASA fixed the Voyager 2 glitch! It's back in action - http://bit.ly/cpH2tF
- Chuck ReynoldsRT @AlexBerger Woot! @NASA fixed the Voyager 2 glitch! It's back in action - http://bit.ly/cpH2tF
- Chuck Reynolds"NASA's moonshot program is in tatters, and the shuttle's due to fly for the last time soon ... but it doesn't mean there's no exciting space news. For example: Did you know NASA could send an android to the moon inside just three years? This crazy scheme even has a funky, mysterious title to go with its radical science and engineering: Project M. It's not funded at Agency level yet, let alone at the governmental level (from where dedicated funding would have to come) but it seems to be a highly mature project, with some engineering precedents already in place, including robotics and shuttle-derived rocketry."
- RAPatton"The moonshot would work like this: NASA would fire aloft a modified existing rocket, making the most of the fact that the rocket wouldn't have to be human-rated, and no pesky (and heavy) supplies like oxygen, water, and food need be hurled moonwards to accompany the robot. This launch would place a small autonomously flying capsule to the moon, which would be propelled using green fuel (liquid methane and oxygen) and which would make an automatic landing. When all was safe, the capsule would pop open to reveal the robot, a humanoid-shaped walker with manipulator arms that are more or less analogous to human arms. The 'bot would be self-sufficient to some extent, but it will also be steered by Earth-based astronauts. The purpose is to test and refine the basic engineering issues that any future long-term lunar or Martian missions would face, in terms of construction. But there'd also be room for perfecting lunar mission management processes, performing opportunistic science with the benefit of more adept manipulators than...
- RAPattonNASA HD pic of the oil spill http://goo.gl/o17s
- Bill Romanos
Photo: NASA, public domain.
That Can't Be Good
Photos taken by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite satellite on May 17th and released today show that the BP oil spill has a massive 'arm' that is spreading out in the Southeast direction. Is it caught in the Gulf of Mexico's Loop Current?...Read the full story on TreeHugger

"In a development that has transformed the appearance of the solar system's largest planet, one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has completely disappeared.
"This is a big event," says planetary scientist Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. "We're monitoring the situation closely and do not yet fully understand what's going on.""
Keep an eye out for monoliths.
- Mark HDemotion?
- EivindHoly crap!
- Ciaoenricowow
- mohammadkI say send the Cassini Division!
- Alexander Kruel1UP Eivind
- Spidra WebsterThis is the Jupiter we all grew up with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jupiter.jpg -- Notice the big storm is gone too...
- Alexander Kruelit's on the other side.
- Joe Silence (circumspect)You're right. I read something about it vanishing. Guess that was something else :-)
- Alexander KruelWow. Well Jupiter's storms are changing all the time. The Red Spot is only a few hundred years old I think, for example.
- Kol TregaskesRT @lonelycoo: HD video's of todays Space Shuttle launch. - http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/index.html
[Direct Link]"NASA's website contains a wealth of amazing photographs. Here is a collection of some of my favorites from NASA's Image of the Day Gallery"
- Kol TregaskesOh my God, it's full of stars! http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100512.html "M72: A Globular Cluster of Stars" #space
[Direct Link]The Gulf oil spill, as seen from the ISS http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=43897&src=eorss-iotd
[Direct Link]"The section of wood, from the original tree from which the apple fell that inspired Newton's theory of gravity, is normally held in the Royal Society's archives. It was lent to British-born astronaut Dr Piers Sellers, who will be taking it into orbit, as part of the academic institution's 350th anniversary celebrations."
- M FNew Lego Space Shuttle Is the Ultimate Nerdgasm [Lego] http://j.mp/aiDG3c
Voyager 2 having a glitch, pretty reliable though considering it was launched 30 years ago! http://bit.ly/baoKYF
Voyager 2, which has been traveling through the solar system since the late '70s, has suffered a data formatting glitch that is preventing NASA from interpreting the content of its scientific data transmissions. Control and diagnostic transmissions are unaffected, which should enable the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to troubleshoot the problem, provided they're patient—it currently takes nearly 13 hours for transmissions from Earth to catch up with the probe.
According to a statement released by the JPL, the problem first became apparent on April 22nd. Data from the scientific transmission, which currently reports on the conditions at the very edge of the solar system, began coming through with improper formatting, making it impossible to interpret the contents. Engineering data is still intelligible, so the JPL staff is expecting that it will be possible to figure out what's going wrong and introduce a fix. Serious attempts at repair were delayed by a planned roll maneuver, and only started on Friday. With a round-trip time of over a day, however, progress will undoubtedly be slow.
According to an Associated Press report, engineers think that there's been a fault in the memory that stores the formatted data prior to transmission. This either corrupted its current contents, or has introduced some bad bits into the onboard memory. It should be possible to either reset the bad memory, or program the system to stop using the errant hardware entirely.
Voyager 2 is currently the second-most distant human-made object, trailing its twin, Voyager 1, by about 3 billion kilometers (Voyager 1 is now 16.9 billion kilometers—about 10.5 billion miles—from Earth). Right now, the probes are near the turbulent sector of space where the solar wind pushes up against interstellar space. Both probes are expected to cross into interstellar space within the next few years, providing our first in-place observational data from outside the solar system. They'll also record what happens at the boundary itself—they may cross it several times, given that its precise location fluctuates with changes in solar activity.
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