Eideard

An artist’s conception shows the breakup of the Phobos-Grunt probe in the atmosphere

Russia’s botched Mars probe mission Phobos-Grunt is fast approaching a fiery death, with just one or two days remaining before it falls from space…

“The European Space Agency’s current re-entry prediction for Phobos-Grunt … points to the early evening (Central European Time) on Sunday, Jan. 15, with an uncertainty of plus/minus five orbits,” equal to plus or minus 7.5 hours, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the space debris office at ESA’s European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany…

A statement from Russia’s Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) also pegged Sunday as the crash day for Phobos-Grunt, but went even further. According to the statement, released in Russian, the 14-ton spacecraft filled with fuel is expected to fall on Sunday and may crash in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Chile.

Russian space officials pegged the potential crash time as occurring at about 4:51 p.m. ET Sunday, although major uncertainties still remain. There is a chance the spacecraft could fall earlier in the day, or on Monday…

As Phobos-Grunt draws closer and closer to its fiery finale, a worldwide team of skywatchers is on standby alert in the hopes of spotting the fall.

“Experienced observers know that the probability of seeing any given satellite re-entry is very small, so they maintain very low expectations,” said Canada-based Ted Molczan, a leader in the citizen network of observers.

RTFA for beaucoup details.

Yes, I’m one of those people who will go outdoors and look around the expected atmosphere impact time.

This picture isn’t something you see every day, and it’s something there’ll only be one more chance to capture: a Space Shuttle launch photographed from an in-flight passenger jet. Stefanie Gordon shot this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s launch with her iPhone as her plane descended for a landing.

The shot itself is a rare enough event, but what happened next was an eye-opener for the photographer. According to Mashable, within a few hours of uploading the launch pics to Twitter from her iPhone, Stephanie was getting phone calls from ABC, CNBC and the BBC. Her follower count on Twitter went up by over 1000, and she was getting so many @mentions as a result of the pic that she had to shut them off so her iPhone’s battery didn’t get drained.

Other people on the plane took pics, but apparently none of them uploaded them to Twitter. The real draw of this story isn’t that the photo was taken with an iPhone — people use the device to take extraordinary pics all the time — but the colossal and immediate response the photographer got after sharing it. This scenario shows just how interconnected everything has become today thanks to devices like the iPhone, and it’s a trend that’s only going to become more powerful as more people start sharing information this way.

Go ahead. Tempt me to make something more than incidental use of Twitter and Facebook.

It’s pretty difficult to change a hermit into a sociable old curmudgeon.

NASA’s Voyager 1 probe is nearing the edge of our solar system after 33 years and nearly 11 billion miles of spaceflight. The spacecraft may make the final crossing into interstellar space in just four more years…

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a region of space in the outer solar system where the speed of solar wind – charged particles streaming from the sun – is effectively zero. NASA scientists think the steep drop in solar wind speed is a sign that it has been blown sideways by a more powerful interstellar wind that blows in the spaces between stars…

Voyager 1 has traveled about 10.8 billion miles from the sun since it launched on Sept. 5, 1977 on a mission to swing by the gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn.

But Voyager 1 did not stop there. It continued on its way and in 2004 crossed a solar system boundary known as the termination shock – the border at which the sun’s supersonic solar wind crosses a shockwave, slows down and heats up…

NASA thinks Voyager 1 could cross into the interstellar frontier by 2014. When the probe makes the crossing, there should be a sudden drop in the amount of hot particles Voyager 1 encounters and a spike in the number of cold particles it detects, NASA officials said…

In June, Voyager 1′s solar wind sensor began clocking an outward speed of zero. Scientists tracked the speed measurement for months to make sure it was accurate.

“When I realized that we were getting solid zeroes, I was amazed,” said Rob Decker, a Voyager Low-Energy Charged Particle Instrument co-investigator and senior staff scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. “Here was Voyager, a spacecraft that has been a workhorse for 33 years, showing us something completely new again.”

As shortsighted as our politicians and pundits have always been – opportunism is a demanding mistress – they were less so when space exploration made bigger headlines. Anyone think we could get such a project approved today?

I mean – in the United States Congress, of course.

A US satellite carrying the biggest commercial antenna reflector ever put in space has been launched successfully from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. The mesh structure on the Skyterra-1 spacecraft is 22 metres across.

It will relay signals for a new 4G-LTE mobile phone and data system for North America run by Lightsquared.

Callers whose networks are tied into the system will be automatically switched to a satellite if they are out of range of a terrestrial mast.

Lightsquared is the latest effort to try to establish a hybrid satellite-terrestrial system in the US…Lightsquared has promised a different approach. It says its business will be wholesale only. It will be selling capacity to carriers who wish to offer go-anywhere connectivity to their consumers, be they phone or data users.

The system will be capable of supporting smartphone-sized devices, it says.

Under a schedule approved by the Federal Communications Commission, the company has to have a ground network of terrestrial stations in place to serve 90% of the US population by the end of 2015.

The Skyterra-1 satellite was launched from Baikonur on a Proton rocket at 2329 local time on Sunday (1729 GMT)…

The 22m-antenna on Skyterra-1 should be deployed by the end of the month. A second satellite, Skyterra-2, will follow in 2011.

Fascinating stuff. Especially for Satellite TV geeks like me who have become accustomed to following the day-by-day that leads to these launches.

There’s an amazing amount of traffic up in the sky. Including a lot of dross.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Amazon, displaying a sense of urgency, perhaps driven by the pending launch of Apple’s tablet-style computer is turning its Kindle device into a platform. The Seattle-based company…announced that it will allow software developers to “build and upload active content” and distribute it through the “Kindle Store later this year.” Amazon will be giving out a Kindle Development Kit that will give “developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content for Kindle.” The company will launch a limited beta effort next month.

I would also like to see what developers come up with. An Electronics Arts’ executive in Amazon’s press release says that the company is looking to develop games for the Kindle platform. I wonder how much can you do with the limited hardware that is a Kindle. Screen refresh rates are low, the inbuilt processor is puny and of course no color. Unless Amazon is planning to launch a beefier and color version of the device, game developers are unlikely to be able to create great experiences on Kindle…

As I wrote back in March 2009…people are looking for a cheap, connected Internet device that is “not a laptop.” I was recently watching an interview with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on “Charlie Rose” in which he talked about the Kindle being flexible enough to encourage new kinds of media consumption, including multimedia books and newspapers with immersive content and interactivity. I think he is spot on — and just from that perspective, Apple has to be thinking really hard about this looming opportunity.

There’s only one reason to make the announcement early. Trying to cop attention for the project before Apple’s launch party on the 27th.

I wish we could get KB into the official launch for a hands-on review.

General Motors launched a new small car on Monday priced at about 7,000 dollars that will be released first in the Indian market and eventually sold in 150 countries.

The Chevrolet Beat is a compact hatchback aimed at the growing Indian middle classes that GM hopes will help boost its sales in the country by 30 percent this year to 100,000 units…

The Beat, to be priced at 334,000 rupees in its basic model, will be sold in more than 150 countries worldwide, including Europe, other parts of Asia and North America, the company said…

The Beat will be one of the attractions at AutoExpo 2010 in New Delhi, which runs until January 11 and is a showpiece for compact vehicles.

Slym also said GM India would double production at its Talegaon plant in the western state of Maharashtra to 90,000 cars per year because of the Beat’s introduction.

The critter targets 44mpg for all-round consumption. From what I’ve read, strength and safety standards for the Euro and US markets are designed-in.

There are at least 20 million households in the United States awaiting the launch of this satellite – though probably 99% or more are unaware of it’s nearness or even that it’s taking place.

They may have noticed a phrase or two added to the latest commercials from DirecTV. “Coming Soon – capacity for another 50 high definition channels” – and that’s about it.

There are several hundred satellite TV geeks allied with DirecTV who track every satellite from inception to launch.

Since D12 launches Monday evening – US time – we have our own countdown in progress and follow photos and blog comments from the Baikonur Cosmosdrome with rapt attention.

I offer this video [large version] not only to those of you who are space geeks – or TV geeks – but, just as a snippet of time in the preparation for launch of one of the biggest long-serving rockets around. Also some pretty damned good camerawork.

BTW – if you are a DirecTV subscriber, channel 577 has been activated and you can tune in to the launch, Monday, 28th – at 7PM EST.

A Nasa satellite designed to uncover hidden cosmic objects has blasted off from California.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Delta II rocket just after 1409 GMT…

The probe is expected to uncover objects that have never seen before, including some of the coolest stars and the most luminous galaxies. The $320m mission will do this by scanning the entire sky in infrared light with a sensitivity hundreds of times greater than ever before.

The satellite will also have a role in planetary protection: WISE will be able to detect some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets.

This would help efforts to determine whether any of these objects could strike Earth in the near future…

Wise joins two other infrared missions in space: Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory.

Bravo!

A series of spooky lights above parts of the northeastern United States Saturday sparked a flurry of phone calls to authorities and television news stations…

CNN affiliate stations from New Jersey to Massachusetts heard from dozens of callers who reported that the lights appeared as a cone shape shining down from the sky.

However, the lights were the result of an experimental rocket launch by NASA from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, a spokesman told CNN.

Keith Koehler said the Black Brant XII Suborbital Sounding Rocket was launched to study the Earth’s highest clouds. The light came from an artificial noctilucent cloud formed by the exhaust particles of the rocket’s fourth stage about 173 miles high…

Normally, noctilucent clouds are not visible to the naked eye and can only be seen when illuminated by sunlight below the horizon. The launch took place at 7:46 p.m. Saturday, just as the sun was setting for the day.

Observation stations on the ground and in satellites will track the artificial noctilucent clouds created by the rocket for months, NASA said.

And we will track the fear and trepidation of ill-educated superstitious people fearful of signs and portents in the heavens.

I think the researchers at the Wallops Facility must run a pool on how many panic-stricken calls come in from across the East Coast when they plan one of these experiments. They should time the next one to coincide with some auspicious Christian date and really scare the crap out of everyone.

Microsoft is asking people to hold parties in their homes to celebrate the launch of Windows 7. Does this raise anticipation to a fever pitch? Well, no.

There is a site called houseparty.com, easily one of the worst ideas I have ever stumbled across, where people can sign-up to hold parties to support commercial products.

And there, right above the Mexican Avocado party and one for the previously-respectable Dr. Andrew Weil’s baby products line, sits “Windows 7 Launch Party…Global!”

“Be a part of Windows history,” the site promises. “Host a Windows 7 Launch Party. Have Fun. Help Your Friends!”

Help your friends ditch Vista?…

And then there’s the kicker, “Apply online to host a Launch Party. Choose a day from October 22-29 and if you’re selected, you’ll not only receive a special Signature Edition of Windows 7 Ultimate but your very own Windows 7 Party Pack.”

Har! Someone at Microsoft has been smoking the seeds.