I’m Seeing Stars

With the use of a revamped Hubble Space Telescope, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have released the sharpest photos yet of deep space.

With a billion dollar makeover last spring, which included installing two new cameras and other scientific instruments, these latest images are sharper than previous photos taken of the same places.

Capturing nebulas and galaxies, some of the photos glow brilliantly, appearing to display halos in a spectrum of colors.

Prior to this, the refurbished Hubble has only been used to take pictures of Jupiter earlier this summer when an asteroid or comet hit it.

Flight Night

In a rare nighttime lift off early Tuesday morning, the space shuttle Discovery will blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) for three months, assuming weather conditions will be clear for takeoff. 

Taking off at 1:36 a.m. (0536 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral in Florida, seven astronauts will deliver equipment, food and several experiments, including six mice for a bone-loss study and the newly crafted $5 million Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (C.O.L.B.E.R.T.), named after television comedian Stephen Colbert, to the ISS.

Safety has also been an issue, mainly the toughness of the external tank. Foam fragments have tore off the external tanks of the last two launches.

**Shuttle launch was postponed to Wednesday due to thunderstorms that popped up unexpectedly late Monday night around the launch site.

Running In Space

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have recently honored comedian Stephen Colbert by naming a treadmill heading up to outer space after the Canadian.

The treadmill, dubbed C.O.L.B.E.R.T., which stands for Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, is being delivered to astronauts on the International Space Station who are in need of a new machine.

The host of Comedy Central’s spoof newscast show “The Colbert Report” received the honor after telling his viewers to send NASA write-in votes during the agency’s naming competition for their new Node 3 wing on the space station earlier this year.

Although, NASA didn’t name the Node 3 after Colbert, they decided it was only right that the new treadmill bear the funnyman’s name. “However far the space station goes, the treadmill will have gone a few miles further,” joked Colbert.

It’s Alive!

The key to life has been discovered in a comet, according to scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. New research suggests that the amino acid glycine, which is an important biological molecule that helps build proteins and other key components of DNA and RNA, found inside the comet Wild 2 is an essential component for the existence of life on Earth.

“This is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet. Our discovery supports the theory that some of life’s ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts,” lead researcher Jamie Elsila said of the discovery.

Scientists have long believed that the fundamental properties needed for the existence of living organisms derive from space. Samples of Wild 2’s glycine were gathered by NASA’s spacecraft Stardust in 2004 and were the parachuted back to Earth in 2006. Since then, researchers have been analyzing the samples for life forming properties, as well as learning the secrets of comet formation and solar system’s history.