AirSpaceMag.com

Here’s some more creative space photography from Ron Garan, who’s currently on board the International Space Station.

Garan and several other astronauts have teamed up for the Fragile Oasis project, to share the perspective of Earth that they see from orbit. This time-lapse sequence is apparently a sneak peek at a longer version. The Peter Gabriel song, if you’re racking your brain, was used in the Pixar film Wall-E.

Initial reports from an August 11 test of DARPA’s Falcon HTV-2 hypersonic research vehicle were mixed. The glider launched successfully and separated from its Minotaur IV rocket over the Pacific, but engineers lost contact with the vehicle nine minutes into the flight, and the test ended prematurely with the vehicle self-destructing according to safety procedures. The HTV’s first test, in April, also had ended early with a  loss of telemetry at around the same time.

Now DARPA has had more time to go over test data collected by more than 20 sensors positioned on the ground, sea, and air during the August flight. And while still stingy with details about the cause of the premature shutdown, an agency press release says that the Falcon did in fact achieve stable, aerodynamically controlled Mach 20 flight for nearly three minutes, as initial data suggested.

DARPA even produced video, taken from a tracking ship in the Pacific.

And just for fun, here’s an animation showing how easily the HTV-2 would blow past an F-18 poking along at Mach 1.5.

According to computer modeling by NASA’s QuakeSim project, Tuesday’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake in central Virginia moved the city of Washington D.C. a whopping 0.02 inches “to the northwest and downward.” The small town of Mineral, near the quake’s epicenter, shifted about 2.8 inches.

Got 3-D glasses? Then watch this. According to the European Space Agency, it’s the first live 3-D video ever streamed from space.

NASA astronaut Ron Garan is both star and director, and he’s using ESA’s new Erasmus Recording Binocular (ERB-2) camera inside the European Columbus module. ESA plans to start up a 3-D channel on YouTube soon, so get yourself some glasses. These nice people will send you a pair for free.

These days, with so many satellite sensors looking down constantly from orbit, and so many ways to slice their data, it’s hard to remember that hurricanes used to arrive without much warning.

Hurricane Irene is currently bearing down on the Turks and Caicos Islands, and may hit the east coast of the United States by week’s end. Here’s a gallery of different views. I love the names of the different types of color enhancement, like “Rainbow” and “Funktop” (developed by a meteorologist named Ted Funk, it shows areas of intense rainfall).

Hurricane Irene from the GOES East satellite, infrared view, "Funktop" enhancement.

Below is another enhanced infrared GOES-East image. You can see an animated version here. Blue is warmer, red is colder, white coldest. This type of coloring, by the National Hurricane Center, is done, basically, because TV viewers like pretty pictures. Really, no kidding. From the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s product description:

This enhancement is mainly utilized by the National Hurricane Center/ Tropical Prediction Center in Miami, Florida for enhancement of infrared (11µm) imagery for television, newspaper, and internet displays. This enhancement is typically provided for/by the media since they prefer to work with color imagery rather than simple black & white enhanced imagery.

And even though it’s not as colorful, here’s an impressive photo taken yesterday by Ron Garan on the International Space Station: