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Discovery will perform a set of low altitude flybys of Washington DC, USA on the back of the SCA. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/nasa-shuttle-discovery-set-buzz-washington-dc

New supernova discovered in M95 about 1° from Mars: http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2012/03/18/another-bright-supernova-goes-boom-in-m95-near-mars/ It's currently at about mag 12 and rising. I haven't found how high it will rise but random quotes on the internet say it won't get to naked-eye...

Not the actual ISS, but SPHERES that are housed in the ISS. Darpa has opened up a general call-for-anyone to write software to stabilise a randomly tumbling satellite. It'll be done in simulation at first, with the best algorithms being tested on the SPHERES onboard the ISS...

Regular meteor showers are caused by the earth passing through the 'tail' of a comet in the same place every year. But How does this tail stay in the same place? I assume that it doesn't as it has to orbit the sun in some way (and also be affected by the solar wind). Is it just that the comet...

I just read this thread: http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=9908 With many current CPUs having more than one core, is it time to start thinking about multithreading in the orbiter core? At present, everything is done on one core and the graphics suffer if the MFDs do a lot of...

Reading about the OFMM and having sat and watched many VSAs come and go, I got thinking about how to achieve VSAs in general in terms of passing on the misison from one orbinaut to the next. As far as I can tell, the general way of 'handing over the batton' (so to speak) from one person to the...

OK, so lets say that I have an efficient multi-fuel stove in my living room and that I have a lot of paper (mix of newspaper and normal A4). Normally I would recycle the paper, but it's now getting to winter. I don't expect an answer as it's not exactly a simple question, but may be fun to...

An interesting notion: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/02/space_airships/

It seems there was a pretty huge aurora last night. I've never seen the auroras and want to, so I've just signed up to this site to get emailed (or twitter) warnings the next time it's likely to be visible. Unfortunately for you folks abroad it's just a UK warning so may warn you during the day...

I haven't had much time to keep up with spaceflight news recently, but did catch the SLS news. It got me wondering. What was the point of cancelling Arex-1 and Ares-5 only to then come up with the SLS a couple of years later that does largely the same job?

UARS is set to fall from the sky in a month or two. Current Orbit Current Position It's on a 57°-inclined orbit so it could potentially land pretty-much anywhere on the Earth. TFA says that it's 'narrowed' it down to anywhere between 57°S and 57°N... Should be a fireball as impressive as the...

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes/

I've mentioned a few years ago that www.nasaspaceflight.com has a nifty feature whereby it will use the <abbr> HTML tag to tell you what the acronym stands for in the case of well used acronyms. I had a discussion with Tex about trying to put it into the site a while ago but it impacted server...

A mathematician wanted to teach his children the value of cooperation, so he told them the following: "I chose a secret triangle for which the lengths of its sides are all integers. To you my dear son Charlie, I am giving the triangle's perimeter. And to you, my beloved daughter Ariella, I am...

What does the wiggly line in the diagram Of an amphetamine molecule mean? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Amphetamine-2D-skeletal.svg

RKK Energia in talks about private flights to the moon: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/19/0331210/RKK-Energia-Confirms-Private-Trip-To-the-Moon

Does anyone know of a good set of libraries for performing HTTP GETs from a C++ program and then for parsing the resulting web page. Doesn't need to be too fancy. Just a case of downloading a webpage and then parsing it to be able to scan for content easier. Thanks. Must be free to...

People have been musing recently that there are a lot of online polls... so do you participate in them? Damn. That's annoying. I was hoping to be able to supply only one option... the "yes" one. Oh well, I'll see how many 'no's we get.

This thread got me thinking... how do you eat your boiled eggs? Little Endian on left (pointy bit upwalds), big endian on right (pointy bit downwards). I ate it the way my Mum taught me, but that may or may not be the way your Mum/Dad/Godparent/abusive-babysitter/milkman/social-worker/pimp...

For those of you who don't know what big and little endian are, take a look here. But I only found out about 2 months ago (despite knowing what it is for the last 10 years) that the term itself comes from Gulliver's Travels in a dispute between Liliput and Blefescu and was used to describe...