why has it been postponed

and whens it now due to take off

I have recently bought myself a AZ GOTO, as of yet I have not been able to see anything , I have just read the instructions again and hope to get the hang of it soon

There was an issue with one of the heaters in a fuel line feeding one of the the Auxilliary Power Units (APU1) it it's being guessed that there is a short circuit somewhere in the system. There are two heaters but if the good one fails while the shuttle is on orbit then they won't have full hydraulic power for re-entry which isn't the best situation.

The next attempt date hasn't been set yet but it will be a minimum of 72 hours turn around, so Monday at the earliest.

Fron the Official NASA Facebook Page

I'm hearing that they will set a NET (i.e. earliest) of May 8th @ 12:09 EDT and that's assuming that all of the repairs go to plan. There's a press conference at 14:00 EDT so we can expect an 'official' confirmation then.

New NET set for the 16th May.


The repairs seem to be taking longer than they originally thought.

Huge unexplained gamma ray burst in the crab nebula
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13362958

When I read it my first thought was, inter-stellar war, between alien species and they've destroyed themselves with the ultimate doomsday weapon (about 6,500 years ago). I'm assuming gamma rays travel at light speed?.
Of course, in reality, it's almost certainly an unexplained(yet) natural event, but, well, you never know

Yes, Hotelier, gamma rays http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_radiation are higher frequency electromagnetic radiation than ultraviolet light so they would travel at the speed of light also . It is almost certainly some catastophic natural phenomenon that has generated this gamma ray burst.

As to what it is, we don't yet know. It could, for example, be a lot of matter impacting on the surface of the pulsar at the core of the Crab Nebula.

Interesting story about Io.

The shuttle Endeavour is due off in just under 5 hours time. See shuttle launch.

Launch due at 1.56pm BST.

One one more shuttle after this one.

Just saw a live shot of the launch pad on CNBC - all seems to be going to schedule at present.

Not sure why a financial channel is doing this, but CNBC keep returning to the live pictures from Cape Canaveral - just seen the astronauts getting ready. They have said they will keep popping back whenever there is anything new to see.

Noticed on the Nasa website there is a plugin for google earth to track the shuttle in (almost) real time. Is this new?

That seems to be new. I have not seen it before.

That Google Earth plug in is very good.

The space shuttle will be flying over the UK. Sadly we will not be able to see it.

"The moon of Jupiter erupts about 100 times more lava on to its surface each year than does Earth.

A re-assessment of data from Nasa's Galileo probe suggests all this activity is being fed from a giant magma ocean under Io's crust."

Indeed it is, HenryGarten, and Jupiter's gravitational tidal stretching of Io is providing the energy to keep that magma ocean in a liquid state. If Io had either been much further away from Jupiter or orbiting the Sun in its own right then it would be a quiescent frozen ball.

For a newscientist article, it's uncharacteristically small. I think this is a much better list:
Top 10 biggest things in the universe

ISS shuttle docking due at 1116am BST today.

Any idea how I stop it now when I don't to see where the shuttle is?

You just uncheck it.

The Pope greet the astronauts on the ISS

Thanks Henry but I sorted it in the end. Couldn't find anything in the menu. Then I remembered about the sidebar (or whatever it's called) which I had forgotten about and it was simples.

Historic day today. See this thread.

RIP Mars Rover Spirit