Space Station Lab Launched

delorean writes "The Shuttle Atlantis lifted off last night on a spectacular evening launch. It had to be the most beautiful launch I've seen, even if it was only by TV. Check out this pic of the boosters rockets falling away. The Shuttle is carrying the Destiny Laboratory for the International Space Station, the most expensive piece of equipment for the multi-national effort. Once the Destiny is hooked up and online the control of the ISS will switch over to a special Mission Control center in Houston instead of Russia. Get the incredible statistics about the assembly here. Read the Mission goal, Realtime Tracking of the Shuttle and ISS here and catch Sightings here."

Re:Gripping

[Nater]

Or in other words....

A device that could be built into the hand of a robot so that the robot can "feel" how hard it's squeezing whatever it is that it's holding.

Use real, hard links!

[Tau Zero]

The article references a pic of "the booster rockets falling away". What pic? I looked at the link and there is no pic of the boosters on it any more.

Next time, cite the full and exact URL!
--
Knowledge is power
Power corrupts
Study hard

Re:Use real, hard links!

[HerringFlavoredFowl]

grab it off of spaceflightnow [spaceflightnow.com], they have a quicktime of it [spaceflightnow.com]

TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken,
The Hot Burning Cajun Type...

Front Page? -sigh-

[TOTKChief]

Of course, it's not like this is that important, anyway. It's just ISS, right? Actually, Destiny's not even truly outfitted with racks. We need another couple flights before science can really happen...and NASA's pushing the science back right now in favor of the assembly sequence anyway. That's okay--lots of the science isn't ready. =)
--

NASA TV

[MCZapf]

Watching NASA TV (available on the Internet [nasa.gov] and...on TV), you get to hear the communications between Mission Control and the Space Shuttle. It's rather interesting. The night of the launch I was listening in - they were talking about setting up the network, the router, something about mapping drives. (I wonder what kind of bandwidth they have up there, or if I can do a traceroute an Astronaut's laptop - probably not) There's a commentator who explains things to you and throws lots of interesting trivia your way. For example, just 1.5 minutes after launch, due to fuel consumption, the shuttle/fuel tank/boosters together weigh half of what they did on the pad. The boosters consume 10 tons of fuel per second. Wow. That's just crazy. Also they have highlights of the days activities, replays of the launch, etc. I recommend it.

Gripping

[joecool12321]

I'm glad were spending millions of dollars to research [estec.esa.nl]

The Handgrip Dynamometer

(HGD) is a stowable hand held device capable of measuring instantaneous hand strength as a function of time. The principle components of the HGD are a handgrip, instrumentation amplifier, and associated cables. Dynamic voltage representing instantaneous hand strength is taken from the output of the instrumentation amplifier and sent to a laptop computer or to a data acquisition system for data manipulation, display, correlation with other data sources, and/or storage.

Which basically means we get to watch astronauts use a vice grip.

Yes, I know there is valid research going on...I think