Maksim Surayev/Roskosmos

We’ve mentioned cosmonaut Maksim Surayev’s blog before, but it really is worth checking out—some of the most entertaining dispatches ever written from orbit.

Even his photos have personality, like this one, of his watch floating in front of the space station’s window.

Here’s the link.

Sony Pictures

A shame that Cessna doesn’t seem to recognize a potential PR gold mine. Remember when Mathias Rust landed a rented Cessna 172 near Red Square in 1987? Not a peep from Cessna headquarters. Now the company appears to have missed out again: In the mega-apocalyptic move 2012, a lowly Cessna 340A saves one extended family from a variety of spectacular demises.

The world’s only Antonov An-225 makes a valiant attempt to do the same but ends up sliding off a cliff and exploding (as does just about everything else, everywhere, 24/7, in this movie). Oh, and Kennedy is back in the White House — the aircraft carrier, that is.

Concept courtesy of Lockheed Martin.

Size matters. (Well, at least in the surveillance world.)

And three projects under way take dimensions to whole new lengths. The LEMV (it stands for Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle) is a mammoth hybrid airship championed by the U.S. Army as part of a future fleet of reconnaissance vehicles. As required in the U.S. Army’s LEMV proposal request, the non-rigid autonomous airship must be able to operate at 20,000 feet above sea level, have a 2,000-mile radius, and remain deployed for 21 days.

The 250-foot-long airship will be able to house a 5,000-pound payload of radar and motion-imagery sensors, in addition to other spyware. While the LEMV has yet to be built—Lockheed Martin is one possible airframe supplier—the buoyant behemoth is expected to deploy to Afghanistan within 18 months.

Photograph courtesy AeroVironment, Inc.

On the other end of the spectrum is AeroVironment’s NAV (Nano Air Vehicle) “Mercury,” which weighs less than an ounce. Mercury mimics a bird in flight with its ability to climb and descend vertically—as well as fly sideways and backwards—and is part of a new class of small remote-controlled gadgets able to fly indoors and gather intelligence in urban settings.

Lockheed Martin’s NAV, based on a maple seed, is in the second stage of testing. As we reported in 2006, Lockheed Martin hopes that soldiers will be able to carry the NAV in their pockets, and use the technology to photograph cave interiors, or to see what’s lurking down a blind alley.

Photograph courtesy Lockheed Martin.

According to Jill Krugman, a public affairs officer with Lockheed Martin, DARPA stopped funding the project at the conclusion of phase one. But the company felt development should continue, and the corporation has been funding the project through Independent Research and Design (IRAD). “Through IRAD,” says Krugman, “the team developed the approximately 30″ SAMARAI as a technology demonstrator.” (View a YouTube video of the 30″ prototype here.) As the project progresses, the team will build increasingly smaller versions, based upon what they learn during testing.

Seiran on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (Carolyn Russo/NASM)

Workers at the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory announced on November 12 that through the use of submersibles, they had located at 2,600 feet two Japanese submarines that the U.S. military had scuttled off Oahu in 1946 after post-war assessment. One, the I-14, was designed to carry two Aichi M6A Seirans (“storm from the clear sky”) intended to catapult from the sub after it surfaced and attack the U.S. naval fleet. Aichi built 28 Seirans; the sole survivor was restored in 2000 at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and put on display in 2003.

The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory is financed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A documentary on the Laboratory’s find will air on the National Geographic Channel (check local listings).

Photo: ESA/ OSIRIS Team

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft took these spectacular views of a crescent Earth last week during its final close fly-by. The first frame starts at a distance of 683,000 miles. The last was taken from 198,000 miles.

LightSail 1, the way we hope it will look next year. (Planetary Society)

The history of solar sailing is basically the story of Charlie Brown and the football. It remains a great concept, a technology that could theoretically take us to the stars. But for all their promise, actual solar sail missions tend to end in failure, usually before they even begin, and often through no fault of their own.

Notable disappointments include the Planetary Society’s Cosmos 1, which in 2005 got dumped into the ocean by an errant Volna rocket immediately after launch. Ditto NASA’s Nanosail-D in 2008, except that this time it was a Falcon 1 rocket that failed.

Now, thanks to a $1 million anonymous donation, the Planetary Society is ready to try again with a spacecraft called LightSail, the first of which is due to reach orbit late next year (assuming the Society can raise the rest of the project’s estimated cost of “under $2 million”).

I wish them the best of luck. And I hope when they do fly, they’ll include a nifty experiment that was planned for Cosmos 1, but never got the chance to be tested. Back then physicist Gregory Benford, who’s probably better known as a science fiction writer, along with his brother James, president of Microwave Sciences near San Francisco, proposed hitting Cosmos-1 with a ground-based microwave beam to see if it could impart a modicum of acceleration.

Microwave or laser beam propulsion has been proposed as a way to push sail-equipped starships to fantastic speeds. We’re a long way from building such vehicles, but the Benfords’ experiment was at least a way to get started by testing the basic physics.

Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society, arguably the world’s foremost champion of solar sailing and director of the LightSail program, says it’s too early to say whether a beaming experiment will be included. “I would like to do it, but we have not addressed it yet,” he writes by email.

Let’s hope it works out. And best of luck, too, to the Japanese space agency JAXA, which is planning its own solar sail mission in 2010, called IKAROS.

See? There was a plume (the fan-shaped smudge) after all. (Photo: NASA/ LCROSS Team)

Congratulations and apologies are due. The LCROSS team, who endured much grumbling  from Internet viewers after last month’s crash into the moon failed to produce a big visible plume, is reporting what they say is clear evidence of water in a lunar crater. Not just a thimbleful, either—at least 24 gallons, and probably more, from a crater 20 to 30 meters wide. The spectral signature from two different instruments is “very real,” said a smiling principal investigator Anthony Colaprete.

The results from LCROSS lend credence to the idea that the rest of the hydrogen detected a decade ago at the moon’s poles is water ice, too, according to Greg Delory, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. Read about the LCROSS results here.

ESA ©2009 MPS for OSIRIS Team

You must need patience to work on Europe’s Rosetta comet mission. Launched in 2004, the spacecraft won’t arrive at its main destination, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, until 2014. That’s longer than New Horizons is taking to get to Pluto. The reason is that it requires a lot of energy to meet up with a comet orbiting at five times Earth’s distance from the Sun. In fact, Rosetta has had to repeatedly pump up its energy by making three close swings past Earth and one past Mars.

Tomorrow morning comes the last of these gravitational boosts: Rosetta will pass within 1500 miles of a point above the Indonesian island of Java at about 8:45 a.m. European central time.

The picture above is Rosetta’s most recent view of Earth, returned just today from a distance of 393,000 miles as the spacecraft approached our planet.

But I prefer the beauty below, taken during the probe’s last visit exactly two years ago. It isn’t often that you see both the color sunlit crescent (bottom) and the lights of Earth’s cities at night.

ESA/ OSIRIS Team

Wait—India has an aircraft carrier?

That navy workhorse, the aircraft carrier, has been around for 100 years. (Ok, nearly. While the concept was presented in 1909, the first ship, the Royal Navy’s HMS Furious, didn’t make its debut until 1917.) But after a century, very few countries still have carriers as part of their arsenal. The United States has the most by far, with a whopping 11. The United Kingdom, with its long naval history, has just two. Italy and Spain also have two carriers, while France, Russia, Brazil, India, and Thailand each have one.

The Admiral Gorshkov

That list doesn’t include the number of carriers in development, however, nor does it say anything about the history of each ship. For instance, India’s active carrier, the Viraat, is a Centaur-class carrier that started life as the HMS Hermes with the Royal Navy (and was built during 1944-1953). The Hermes, sold to India in 1987, was retrofitted from 1999-2000, and returned to the fleet in 2001.

In 2004 the Indian government purchased the Russian-built, Kiev-class Admiral Gorshkov, which was built in 1978 and commissioned in 1987. (It was put up for sale in 1996, but didn’t find a taker until 2004.) Currently being upgraded, the Gorshkov (which will become the Vikramaditya, named for an ancient Indian king) won’t be ready for service until 2014.

And, as reported by the Government of India’s Press Information Bureau in February 2009, India has begun building its first indigenous aircraft carrier, making it one of only four nations with the capability to do so.

Harrison "Jack" Schmitt on the moon, December 1972, with Earth in the background.

We emailed moonwalker Harrison Schmitt, the Apollo 17 lunar module pilot and the only geologist—the only scientist—to have walked on the moon, and asked him if he’d seen the new photos of his old stomping grounds. He had. Anything strike him as different from the way it looked in December 1972?

“The most surprising geological aspect of the image is the very dark area that begins about 100 meters north of the SEP [the Surface Electrical Properties transmitter] site,” he replied. “This is probably a concentration of black pyroclastic beads (also seen at Shorty Crater) in the regolith. If we had been able to see it before the Apollo 17 mission, we probably would have picked a station there for a stop on the way to Station 6 (the large boulder site at the base of the North Massif).”

When asked if there’s anything he’d like to see in more detail on future LRO passes, Schmitt had a ready answer. “I suspect that they plan eventually to image the entire area; but a comparable image of Shorty Crater where we found the orange pyroclasitc glass [here's a description of the site and here's a lab photo of the glass beads and an accompanying description] and of the boulder tracks on the walls of the valley would be of great interest. This resolution and sun angle may make it possible to map the distribution of pyroclastic glass throughout the area and region.”

What else did he think was noteworthy? “The very dark rectangle a the LRV [Lunar Roving Vehicle] final parking spot is puzzling,” he said. “Something drastically changed the albedo of the upper surface of the LRV, probably the result of changes to the materials of the seats or because of deposits from broken silver-zinc batteries. Similary, the area immediately arouund the Challenger descent  stage appears darkened, also probably because of contamination from the materials or fluids in the stage.

“Our EVA 1-3 LRV tracks away from the landing area are not obvious,” he continued, “but I suspect other versions of the image will show them. That will be more difficult because the landing area had been lightened by the winnowing of fine material from the top of the regolith giving a very thin albedo enhancement. Tracks in this area look dark because of stirring up the normal dark regolith from below this enhancement.

“Just seeing this overhead, high sun angle detail of the Apollo 17 landing site in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow strikes my interest!” Schmitt wrote. “The pre-Apollo 17 photography we had for planning was at lower sun angles and at least ten times lower resolution. Having a record of our activities in the vicinity of the Challenger [lunar module] stirs great memories. My appreciation and awe goes to Mark Robinson and his LRO team.”

Copyright the National World War II Museum.

Ready to experience World War II in “4-D”? Head over to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans for the opening of Tom Hanks’ latest production, Beyond All Boundaries.

The 35-minute film takes viewers from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, and will be shown exclusively in the museum’s newly expanded Solomon Victory Theater. Featuring the voices of Kevin Bacon, Brad Pitt, Patricia Clarkson, and Gary Sinise, among others, the movie took five years to plan and complete.

Sensory effects allow audiences to feel the rumbling of tanks and the booming of anti-aircraft fire. “This is not just a widescreen movie,” Hanks told the Associated Press yesterday. “There’s actual things that pop up, actual elements that come into it that put you in the environment.”

Visit the National World War II Museum’s home page to see a clip from the film, and to learn more.

Here’s the video from MIT’s TechTV:

Ron Dick rose to the rank of Air Vice Marshal and later became a fellow of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and a popular writer and lecturer on military history. He died in 2008. His son Gary Dick, who put together this video from Ron’s footage, says, “As a lifelong supporter of the National Parks and a man with a keen interest in bird watching, Ron would definitely endorse the flight restrictions that ensure natural quiet in the parks today.”

Flickr photo by Airsafe.

Yes, our avian brothers committed feathered mayhem in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic The Birds, but is that any reason they should continue to be chucked into aircraft engines?

Here’s the deal: All aircraft have to pass certification tests proving that the airplane can continue operating in the event of a bird-strike. The certification process divides the bird population into small-, medium- and large-size. Small birds can weigh up to 3.2 ounces, medium-size birds up to 2.5 pounds, and large birds over 2.5 pounds (a Canada goose can easily weigh 12 pounds).

The most common way to conduct the test is to shoot dead birds (usually chickens or geese) into an aircraft engine to see if the engine can still produce thrust. As William Langewiesche described in the June 2009 issue of Vanity Fair (“Anatomy of a Miracle”), “In real time the birds pass almost instantaneously through the test engines. They go in whole and emerge as spray. Animal advocates have objected to this.”

How much of a problem are bird-strikes, anyway? They’re actually a huge concern to commercial and military aviation; it is estimated that they cost U.S. commercial aviation more than $1 billion each year in aircraft damage and lost revenue caused by delays. The U.S. Air Force alone experiences about 2,500 bird-strikes annually. (Military aircraft are more vulnerable as they tend to travel at lower altitudes where birds fly.)

The first known aircraft fatality caused by a bird, according to a 2002 study by Navjot Sodhi, published in the American Ornithologists’ Union journal The Auk, “occurred in 1912, when a gull (Larus sp.) was caught in the control cables of an aircraft, causing it to crash.”

And it’s only gotten worse.

Sodhi reports that faster, wide-body aircraft receive more bird-strikes than older, narrow-body jets: “With the wider bodied aircraft, birds have to fly twice as far to escape than they do for the older small-bodied aircraft.”

Is it really necessary to use actual birds for engine testing?

At certain stages of aircraft development, artificial birds are used in place of the real thing, but more often, the birds are…actual birds, slaughtered right before testing. (Langewiesche notes: “There is a concern among some engine specialists that the farm-raised test birds being used today are themselves unrealistic, because they are flabby compared with their wild brethren, who seem to cause more damage than test birds of the same weight.”)

But help is on the way. BAE Systems in London is working on an advanced computer simulation to take the place of actual birds, at least during some tests. According to Stuart McCallum of BAE Systems, there is plenty of debate about the merits of using artificial versus actual birds in testing. “It varies depending on a number of factors such as impact angle, target shape and material,” he wrote to us by email.

BAE uses physical artificial birds (made of gelatin) for testing, as well as a computer representation of a Canada goose. “The shape of these [artificial] birds are often cylinders, representing the torso of the bird. They do not account for the neck and wings of a Canada goose, in contrast to the computer representations which do,” says McCallum.

The cost, however, is minimal. “Physical artificial birds are not too expensive to produce,” says McCallum, “being based largely on gelatin. The current computer simulation model took some time to develop, but since it’s a computer representation we can use it to analyze impacts with aircraft continually, with no recurring costs.”

Ultimately, it’s the certification authorities that will decide if artificial birds—or a computer model—can take the place of actual birds. “We need to prove that artificial birds are representative of real birds if they are to be used in the ‘final’ qualification [engine] tests,” says McCallum.