Here’s something you don’t see every day.. or will ever again: two Space Shuttle Orbiters, nose to nose:

[Click to enspaceplanate.]

The two Orbiters, Discovery and Endeavour, are seen here outside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Both are being cleaned up and prepped to be shipped (or, more properly, flown) to museums; Discovery to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and Endeavour to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.

[UPDATE: Here's a shot of the two Orbiters seen from the air!

Very, very cool.]

I expect at some point I’ll pay these ladies a visit. Discovery and I have a connection — it took a camera I worked on up to Hubble back in 1997 — and it’ll be interesting, if also a touch melancholy, to see them up close.

Image credit: NASA

The Space Shuttle project may be over, but we can still get some pretty cool stuff from it. The NASA Goddard Space Light Center put out a time lapse video of the Orbiter Discovery orbiting the Earth while docked to the International Space Station, and like all time lapse animations, it’s enthralling:

[Make sure to click the HD button on the lower right.]

That last shot of the Sun rising on an Orbiter is actually of Atlantis, and was taken on July 19, 2011, not long before the Orbiter undocked from the space station and returned to Earth one last time.

News recently broke that the private company SpaceX is planning on sending its new Dragon capsule to the ISS as early as November of this year. The original plan was for a flyby in a test mission, but now they want to combine the second and third tests and perform an actual docking maneuver. Orbital Sciences is planning to unveil their own capsule next year. So I wonder: what sort of images from the ISS will we be seeing next?

Well, today is certainly shaping up to be "jaw-dropping pictures of Atlantis day"! How so? Well, I already posted the stunning image of the Orbiter’s descent as seen from space, and just the other day I mentioned how I was hoping Nathanial Burton-Bradford would make more 3D images… so guess what? Get out your red/cyan glasses: here’s the plasma-lit descent of Atlantis as seen from space in 3D!

Wow! The ISS astronauts took several pictures of the Orbiter as it descended. Nathanial took two of them from NASA’s spaceflight gallery and combined them to make this anaglyph. If you click between the two original shots (here and here) you can see they were taken a few seconds apart; the motion of the stars, the Earth, and the plasma plume change a little bit (click between them rapidly and you’ll actually get a feel of the motion. Weird).

The other pictures at the NASA page are amazing as well. Funny, when I first heard of the plasma picture I poked around NASA’s site and couldn’t find any other images, but clearly I either missed them or they weren’t up yet. I’m glad Nathanial dug deeper! In his shot, you really get a sense of how far away the Orbiter was from the ISS. In fact, there is a layered feel to the whole scene, with the stars far away, the ISS in the foreground, and the Earth itself stretched out from below you to the horizon.

If you don’t have red/cyan glasses, this one shot makes it worth the effort. It’s truly amazing. More than just a gimmick, a picture like this really gives you a visceral sense of what you’re seeing. Truly wonderful.

Thierry Legault has done it again!™

Thierry, an amateur astronomer from Belgium France, has had many of his amazing photographs grace this blog, and just yesterday I was wondering what he would get from the last Space Shuttle mission. As if on cue, he alerted me about his latest set of pictures, including this amazing shot of Atlantis moving across the face of the Sun:

[Click to enspaceplanenate.]

This is a combination of four images, with the position of Atlantis marked with circles. He took that shot in Germany just 21 minutes before the de-orbit burn, meaning this may be one of the last images ever taken of an Orbiter actually in orbit (the picture I posted earlier today taken from the space station shows Atlantis as it was moving through our atmosphere, when it was no longer in orbit).

A few days earlier, in the Czech Republic, Thierry captured Atlantis and the ISS less than an hour after the Orbiter had undocked:

(more…)

It’s a little early for me to start thinking about my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures, but I have a feeling this one will make the cut: the actual glowing trail of plasma left in the wake of Atlantis as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, as seen from space by astronauts aboard the space station!

Amazing! Oh yes, you want to click to embiggen.

Atlantis undocked from the International Space Station on July 19, and two days later the ISS was in position to coincidentally catch a view of the Orbiter as it made its final descent. This shot shows the plume of ionized gas left behind as Atlantis descended, as well as clouds, parts of the ISS itself, and atmospheric airglow: the faint glow of molecules and atoms high in the atmosphere as they slowly recombine with electrons and emit light.

This shot is simply spectacular. Since the stars aren’t trailed, this must be a fairly short exposure, not more than a few seconds. The trail you’re seeing is therefore not actually the Orbiter streaking across the Earth! The plasma trail behind it fades with time, so the trail is brightest near the Orbiter’s position and fainter as you backtrack along its path. Think of it as an afterglow of the passing of Atlantis.

Why does this happen? The air gets heated by the Orbiter’s ramming the atmosphere at 20+ times the speed of sound. And contrary to popular belief, it’s not friction that heats the air, but compression. When you compress a gas it heats up (like when a bicycle pump gets hot when you use it a lot), and the Orbiter is screaming through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. That compresses the air a lot. A shock wave forms in front of the Orbiter, and the air begins to glow as it gets heated up to temperatures as high as 1260° C (2300° F).

That’s what you’re seeing above: the shocked, rammed, and glowing air as Atlantis pounded through it at several kilometers per second. And it did this many, many times over its life… until this one final time, caught on camera by astronauts high above the Earth.

When I was four, humans landed on the Moon. I grew up with the Saturn V. It was my rocket.

But folks younger than me, people around 35 and younger, they’ve known the Space Shuttle as their rocket their whole lives. This video is a tribute to all of them.

It was put together by Dave Holloway and Adam Rutherford, and shows clips from all 135 Shuttle missions. I like the way they handled Columbia and Challenger, too. Very nice.

Tip of the heat shield tile to my pal Gia.