At 07:44 UTC, May 22, 2012, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket thundered into space, carrying the Dragon capsule into orbit.

So first, holy wow, and yay! That’s fantastic news! This was the second attempt, after a glitchy valve caused a launch abort a few days ago.

This morning’s launch went very smoothly. After achieving orbit, the uncrewed Dragon craft decoupled from the rocket and successfully deployed its solar panels, a key milestone in the mission. When that happened, the cheering from the SpaceX team could be heard in the webcast background, which was delightful. A lot of people on Twitter commented on how NASA’s narration of the event was very stoic and calm, but the SpaceX webcast was very emotional and involved^*. I think both of those are as they should be!

Here’s a short video of the launch:

The entire SpaceX webcast is also online. The key moments are the launch at 44:30 into the video, main engine cutoff and start of the second stage at 47:30, the rocket achieving orbit and Dragon capsule separation at 54:00, and then the solar arrays deploying at 56:20.

Seriously, watch that video at the 56:20 mark. When the arrays deploy, you can hear a huge cheer from the SpaceX employees watching. That was awesome. The SpaceX announcer at deployment made me smile. You can really hear the wonder and excitement in her voice.

So why was this launch important? SpaceX is the first entirely private company to attempt to dock a capsule with the International Space Station. If this mission is a success, it’s a big step toward private companies being able to do resupply missions to ISS, including bringing astronauts to and from orbit (which SpaceX plans to be able to do by 2015). And perhaps most importantly, in the long run it means lowering the cost of putting materials in orbit, and that is absolutely critical in creating a permanent human presence in space.

This launch today is just the start of the mission. On Friday, May 25, the Dragon will undergo a series of maneuvers near and around ISS to show that it can be controlled well enough to dock. If that shakes out, then it will approach the station and an astronaut on board ISS will grab it with the robotic arm, bringing it in to mate. There are supplies on the capsule, including a dozen or so student science experiments to be performed. Finally, after over a week in space, it will undock and return to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific ocean off the coast of California.

We’ve all been waiting a long, long time for this, so my honest and hearty congratulations to the crew at SpaceX and at NASA!

We live in the future, folks.

Image credit: SpaceX

^* I also couldn’t help but notice they use the metric system! Hey NASA, ahem.

The launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 this morning was aborted at literally the last second — the sensors detected too high a pressure in a combustion chamber in one of the engines. Apparently this didn’t put the rocket in any danger, but it was outside the limits for an allowable launch so the computer shut things down.

[UPDATE: SpaceX is reporting a faulty valve caused the issue, and it's being replaced. They should be ready for the Tuesday launch window.]

Here’s video of the last few seconds of the countdown.

Ouch. My thoughts on this are pretty clear: it’s a bummer, but then again that’s all it is. Not a disaster, not a failure, just a setback. These are complicated, complex machines, and delays are inevitable.

The good news is there’s a backup launch date of Tuesday, May 22, at 07:44 UTC (03:44 Eastern US time), and another the next day, May 23, at 07:22 UTC. Hopefully, this glitch can be fixed and the rocket launched on one of those dates.

Space X is looking good to launch its Falcon 9 + Dragon capsule on Saturday morning at 08:55 UTC (04:55 Eastern US time). NASA tweeted about it, saying there’s a 70% chance of good weather at that time. It’s Florida, so that can change in an instant. Check with NASA and Space X for updates.

Space X put together a press kit with details on the launch and mission activities. Via Universe Today I saw this nice video with a great CGI animation of what will happen:

It’s actually a couple of years old, but still fun to watch. NASA TV will be carrying the launch live, as will Space X, and Elon Musk — CEO of Space X– will be live-tweeting it.

Well, what can I say about this devastating and jaw-dropping picture of our nearest spiral neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy?

[Click to massive chainedmaidenate. Do it!]

Well, I could start with HOLY HALEAKALA!

This image is a collection of 11 separate observations of Andromeda taken by NASA’s GALEX satellite. Launched in 2003, GALEX (which stands for Galaxy Evolution Explorer) scans the sky in ultraviolet light, specifically targeting galaxies. Hot stars produce UV light, and so does the gas it illuminates, so by looking in the ultraviolet astronomers can learn about how galaxies are constructed. In the decade since its launch, GALEX has been phenomenally successful, cataloging hundreds of millions of galaxies, some as far as ten billion light years away!

This image of Andromeda is simply stunning. It’s comprised of two colors: what you see here as blue is higher-energy ultraviolet light, and red is lower energy (closer to the kind of light we see). Right away you can see that objects emitting the higher-energy UV are confined to the spiral arms, and lower-energy emitters are spread out across the galaxy. That’s exactly what I would expect: massive stars, the kind that really blast out UV, don’t live very long. They’re born, live out their short lives, and die (as supernovae) pretty much near the spot where they formed, which is in spiral arms. Lower mass stars live long enough to gradually move away from their nurseries, populating the rest of the galaxy.

Also, star formation at the very center of the galaxy probably occurred long ago and shut down, so we don’t see many or any massive stars there.

One thing I didn’t know is that the arms of Andromeda are more like rings! The galaxy is at such a narrow angle that it’s hard to tell, but if you trace the blue emission, the pattern does look more like a ring than a spiral. This jibes with earlier images in infrared taken by Spitzer Space Telescope (which I’ve inset here) and a huge and incredibly beautiful newer one taken with ESA’s Herschel far-infrared telescope (and OMFSM you want to click that link).

From what I’ve read, it’s not clear why the spiral arms appear to be more ring-like. Which I love. Why? Because Andromeda is the nearest big spiral galaxy in the sky, a mere 2.5 or so million light years away. It’s easily visible to the naked eye from a dark site, and I’ve seen it myself countless times using my own eyes, binoculars, and telescopes ranging from small ones up to Hubble. Yet there it is, in all its huge and obvious splendor and beauty, still able to surprise me. That rocks.

And a note about GALEX: NASA recently handed off its operations to Caltech, a very unusual move. The satellite was put into standby mode in February, and I was worried it would be shut down permanently. However, Caltech signed a three-year agreement with NASA — while NASA still owns the satellite, Caltech will now be in control of GALEX’s science mission, managing and operating it. At the end of the agreement it can be renegotiated if GALEX is still in good operating condition. This is an interesting idea, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I love that GALEX gets to continue operations, but handing off science missions to private groups makes me a little uneasy. In this particular case I think it’s fine — Caltech is a research institute after all — but the precedent may have unforeseen consequences. We’ll see.

Still and all, it’s good to see new life breathed into an important and wonderful instrument like GALEX. I certainly hope it will continue to produce cutting-edge science for years to come… as well as amazingly beautiful images like this one.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The view from the International Space Station is always pretty cool, but when an astronaut points the camera at the Earth’s horizon and takes a series of short exposures, adding them together gives a view right out of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s:

[Click to psilocybinate.]

Whoa, man!

Astronaut Don Petit took the pictures to make this composite. Basically, it’s a series of eighteen 30-second exposures added together so the motion of the ISS around the Earth makes the stars trail, the cities blur, and your mind expand, dude.

The brown and green glow over the horizon is the atmospheric aerosol layer; molecules that absorb sunlight during the day and release that energy at night. The red glow above that puzzles me; I’ve written about it before. It might be a reflection of lights from inside the space station, but I suspect it’s actually the aurora; it follows the curve of the Earth, and as you can see from the star trails the camera was pointed toward the poles — the direction you’re likely to see an aurora.

You can see faint star trails above the bright ones too, with a different center of curvature — those probably are from an internal reflection. Either that or the camera got moved, but that seems unlikely! Several people pointed out to me that the fainter trails above the stars are from the solar panels. I should’ve realized that myself!

This picture is one of several posted to Flickr, including this one which looks like it’s from the last scene of "2001: A Space Odyssey". But they’re all worth looking at, if only for their alien beauty.

After all, the photographer was literally high when he took them!

Image credit: NASA

The private company Space X is set to launch its Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon space capsule to the International Space Station on Saturday, May 19, with a backup launch date of May 22.

The launch is set for 04:55 a.m. Eastern time, which is 09:55 08:55 UTC — there’ll be a live webcast at Space X’s site and no doubt NASA TV will carry it as well. They have what’s called an "instantaneous launch window", which means if they don’t launch right on time they can’t just wait a few minutes and try again; they’ll have to go to their backup date. The reason for this is the vagaries of orbital dynamics. The space station is circling the Earth, the planet is rotating underneath it, and the rocket itself has a certain amount of thrust to get Dragon into orbit so it can catch up to ISS. All this adds up to a single Go/No Go decision at the appointed time.

If all goes well, it’ll launch on Saturday, and then the Dragon will take a day to match orbits with ISS. It will undergo a series of tests, including a pass only 2 or so kilometers from the station, to make sure all the controls are OK. If it checks out, it’ll approach close enough for the astronauts on ISS to grab it with the robotic arm, and they’ll pull it in for docking. The Dragon has some cargo for them (supplies and scientific experiments) which they’ll offload, and then the capsule will remain docked for a week and a half, during which time it will be loaded with cargo to bring back to Earth. After that, it undocks, pulls away, does a de-orbit burn, and then comes back to Earth in the Pacific, where it will be retrieved.

This launch will be the second demonstration flight for Space X, proving to NASA they can do this. NASA has money for private venture to do various task — in the case of Space X, there’s about $400M waiting for them if the flight’s successful. And as I’ve said before, whether it’s Space X or a different company, I love the idea that re-supply flights and such are done by commercial ventures. NASA should be in the business of innovating, and let private companies deal with the more routine stuff.

As far as Space X’s statements about all this go, I have to say, I rather liked this part of the press kit:

Pushing the Envelope, Success is Not Guaranteed

Demonstration launches are conducted to determine potential issues so that they might be addressed and – by their very nature – carry a significant risk. All spaceflight is incredibly complicated, and this flight introduces a series of new challenges – it is only the third flight of the Falcon 9 rocket, the second of the Dragon capsule, and the first for a number of all-new components necessary to berth with the International Space Station. If any aspect of the mission is not successful, SpaceX will learn from the experience and try again.

I think this statement is pretty forthright — imagine NASA saying that before a Shuttle launch! — so I give them credit for that. I imagine it could also be interpreted as trying to make an excuse for a problem before the launch… which honestly, it is. But I think it’s a good idea to get this out in the open now, before the launch. I hear a lot of grumbling about delays; this flight has been postponed many times. But remember, the Shuttle launches suffered constant delays, and this is the first time Space X is trying to do such a complicated mission. I figure, let them take their time. Better to do it right. Pushing schedules too hard blows up rockets.

The Dawn mission has been orbiting the asteroid Vesta since July 2011. It’s taken thousands of images of the 500 kilometer-wide (300 mile) rock since then, and JPL just released an amazing video which uses real data from Dawn to simulate flying over the asteroid.

Wow. The animation at Marcia Crater (the bottom crater making up the Snowman triple impact) is especially beautiful and realistic!

Dawn is scheduled to leave Vesta in August and then take a long, slow voyage to the even-larger asteroid Ceres, arriving in 2015. So we still have several months of riveting images of Vesta to look forward to.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA