Endeavor is Home for the Holidays!

After traveling more than six and a half million miles in sixteen days, the space shuttle Endeavor landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in California, on Sunday the 30th of November. Originally scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center, the weather didn't cooperate so NASA had to change the original re-entry and landing plans. Endeavor will be ferried home on a Boeing 747, probably later this week. You can find mission pictures here.

I always breathe a sigh of relief when a shuttle takes off or touches down safely. Since the Challenger exploded just after launch in 1986, and the Columbia re-entry disaster in 2003, there's been that awareness of tension about the danger our explorers face, and that poignant sense of waiting and hoping for their safe return. It's always been part of the experience of those who stay behind, I suppose.

...Or maybe not

One of the costliest and most complex scientific experiments ever attempted by humans has failed, sort of. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ran into some problems this week when one of the transformers, which is necessary for keeping the machine at a very cold temperature, broke down.  The collider ring has to be cooled to a temperature of minus 271.3 Celsius so the protons can travel round the accelerator at more than 99.99 per cent of the speed of light.  Problems with the massive magnets in the collider caused temperatures to rise, delaying the first trial collisions next week.  This little hiccup has halted the experiment for now.  Read more here. A full assesmnent of the damage must be done before the experiment can go on.  The scientists at CERN are hoping to have the machine up and running by the middle of October.  Until then, Doomsday has been postponed.

Large Hadron Collider: By golly, it worked

I have to admit that last night when I went to bed I worried whether I would wake up this morning in a black hole. That's because, in case you hadn't heard, an experiment to recreate the Big Bang was being conducted in Switzerland. Check out this article for an in-depth explanation of how this thing works. The Large Hadron Collider is supposed to help scientists understand why things have mass and what the universe is made of. Of course, those aren't the only reasons for the LHC to exist, scientists want to recreate the conditions right before the Big Bang supposedly happened. The hope to learn something from this experiment, which basically is sending particles into space and smashing them against each other really hard and really fast, creating black holes in space. No worries, say the scientists. The black holes will evaporate before anyone even has a chance to notice.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling

There's a leak in the atmosphere and oxygen from Earth is spilling into space. This could be a very bad thing for us Earthlings. The Earth's magnetic field keeps us from burning to a crisp when ever there are solar eruptions and things like that. But solar wind and other forces of nature are causing our oxygen to be sucked out into space through a hole in the North polar cap. This all sounds very scary in an end-of-the-world kind of way. But scientists tell us we have nothing to worry about. This isn't going to a problem until the Earth is much older and much hotter, like in a few billion years. This is a good thing because I have enough to worry about, Gamma Rays, giant meteors, an ever expanding universe that will someday tear, the list goes on. What's one little space fart from planet Earth?

When galaxies collide

This is some pretty trippy stuff. The space telescope Hubble picked up some images of two clusters of galaxies about 5.7 billion light years away colliding with each other, making for some pretty cool images. Not only that, scientists are now able to get some insight on things like "dark matter" and "dark energy". According to recent research 23% of the Universe consists of dark matter, 4% is ordinary matter such as the galaxies, stars, gas, and planets; the remainder 73% is made up of dark energy. What does this all mean to us? I don't know, I'm still having a hard time wrapping my mind around these concepts. Does anyone have a way of explaining this that makes sense to the average person?

Welcome to Space

Space it really is the final frontier. From the first moment humanity was able to gaze beyond the night skies into our solar system, we've been captivated by it's mystery. Does space fascinate you? Are you a space geek, but not a space professional? Then this is the community for you. At Space...The Final Frontier, you can blog with other space-minded individuals who are also entranced by the stars and the planets. So get ready to explore the inner depths of Space...

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