The unmanned Dragon capsule’s halting, painstakingly slow final movements toward the station, where it was grabbed by a robotic arm at 9:56 a.m. Eastern daylight saving time, represents a first-of-its-kind achievement in the annals of space science. Until the Southern California company, known as SpaceX, succeeded in attaching the capsule to the space station, only governmental agencies had attempted such a rendezvous.

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The tests demonstrated that sensors, navigation equipment, communications links and computer-controlled propulsion systems aboard the Dragon capsule were working properly.

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The predawn skies around Cape Canaveral filled with the bright glow and deep rumble of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s Falcon 9 rocket lifting off the pad, carrying an unmanned Dragon spacecraft on a highly anticipated test flight scheduled to last about two weeks. Within three minutes, the Falcon 9 reached a velocity of 10 times the speed of sound, with the first stage dropping off and the second stage continuing to speed toward orbit.

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Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were intended to explore the outer solar system — a task they competed in 1989. Voyager 1 crossed into the outermost layer of the heliosphere, called the “heliosheath,” in 2004. (The heliosheath is marked by slower solar winds, due to the proximity of interstellar gas.)

Today, Voyager 1 may be only a few hundred million to a billion miles away from the edge of the solar system. It now travels one billion miles every three years, and is currently 11 billion miles away from the sun.

You can get the backstory and more detail from a great NPR “Morning Edition” interview with NASA’s Ed Stone, who has been Voyager’s lead scientist since 1972.

Stone notes that Voyager’s onboard computers have only 8,000 words of memory, with a 23-watt transmitter, much less than modern devices have. With such old and basic equipment, it’s the battery life that’s impressive — based on the decay of Plutonium-238, there will be enough power for some of the scientific instruments on board until 2025.

(Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The Silicon Valley company, which specializes in programmable chips, on Monday announced what it believes is a major leap in making such components impervious to the radiation that strikes spacecraft after they leave the earth’s atmosphere. Harmful streams of high-energy particles can play havoc with semiconductors, causing damage such as interrupting the switching functions of individual transistors on chips.

Radiation is an enormous problem, says Scott Anderson, founder and owner of SEAKR Engineering, a company in Centennial, Colo. that designs specialized computers and other hardware used in satellites and other space-oriented applications. “If you don’t design for it properly, it can take down your whole system,” he says.

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With the presence of water on the planet confirmed, NASA has decided to extend the Phoenix Lander’s 90-day mission by five weeks. “We have lots more to explore within reach of our robotic arm,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator from the University of Arizona at Tucson. Michael Meyer, chief scientist of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA, added, “We’ve gotten to the point where we’re pretty sure we found water, and determined it was H₂O. One of the things (with upcoming missions will be) moving away from finding water to a search for life.”

[Image credit: Ellen Roper]

With the presence of water on the planet confirmed, NASA has decided to extend the Phoenix Lander’s 90-day mission by five weeks. “We have lots more to explore within reach of our robotic arm,” said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator from the University of Arizona at Tucson. Michael Meyer, chief scientist of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA, added, “We’ve gotten to the point where we’re pretty sure we found water, and determined it was H₂O. One of the things (with upcoming missions will be) moving away from finding water to a search for life.”

[Image credit: Ellen Roper]

Google’s current engineering facilities in the United States, India and Switzerland are all leaders in search technology development. However, by locating a research and technology center on the moon, Google engineers will be able to experiment with an entirely different set of parameters. For example, imagine tapping unlimited solar energy to drive megawatt data centers and power innumerable arrays of massively parallel lava lamps, with ample no-cost cooling available to regulate the temperature of server farms sprawling over acres of land unblighted by sentient lifeforms or restrictive zoning ordinances.”

–Excerpt from “Google Copernicus Center Is Hiring,” the company’s 2004 April Fool’s Day hoax

With the establishment of the Google Lunar X Prize, Google’s 2004 Copernicus Center announcement seems less April Fool’s Day hoax, more company aspiration. At Wired NextFest in Los Angeles yesterday, Google said it will award up to $30 million in prize money to anyone able to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon.

To win the purse, the lunar craft must travel the lunar surface to a distance of at least 1,640 feet and relay video, images and data back to Earth. And it must do so by the end of 2012.

“We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration,” said Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation–the nonprofit institute working with Google on this effort. “Moon 2.0, the second era of lunar exploration, will not be a quest for ‘flags and footprints.’ This time we will go to the moon to stay. The moon is a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth–energy independence and climate change.”

That seems a noble goal. Question is: is it an attainable one? There are plenty of skeptics who claim it’s not. “It’s hard to imagine this project costing less than a few hundred million dollars; PayPal billionaire Elon Musk, so far the most accomplished of the ‘new space’ entrepreneurs, has pumped an estimated $100 million into his Falcon 1 launch vehicle [and] still hasn’t reached orbit,” says Popular Mechanics air and space correspondent David Noland. “Against that kind of financial investment, $20 million is a drop in the bucket. A prize-winner would have to come up with millions upon millions on his own. Anyone who can come up with that kind of money would probably want to make up his own rules, not follow Google’s.”