2and1-2color:

~ For more than a hundred years there’s a weather station on top of the Zugspitze which nowadays also gathers data for the Global Atmosphere Watch. Doesn’t it look spacey?

discoverynews:

The Weather On Other Planets
We might be inclined to believe that the weather on Earth is sometimes less than hospitable to the life that inhabits it.But compared to other planets, stars and bodies in the cosmos, the weather on Earth is…

sciencecenter:

Physicists use a laser to create rain

A team from the University of Geneva has used a mobile laser laboratory to trigger the formation of water droplets in the air — a step towards being able to create rain. During 113 hours of firi…

jtotheizzoe:

Where the wind don’t get ya, the storm surge will. How does it work?
Tropical storms like Hurricane Irene are essentially huge swirling blobs of wind and low pressure suck. When the cyclone of high winds swirls around and strikes the s…

Can’t imagine working on the Hubble for all these days and then having your landing delayed. But that’s what’s happening today. The crew of STS-125 won’t be landing until tomorrow, due to weather conditions at Kennedy.

This has been one of the more eventful and high profile missions since the program returned to flight. I’m sure there are some experiments to work on, and there are worse things than a day off 350 miles in orbit. So tonight there will again be two sets of people working and sleeping in space. One set aboard the ISS, the other on Atlantis!

NASA has really embraced interactive media with this mission, and there have also been quite a few independent companies that have popped up to support public interest in the program. And then, of course, there’s “Astro” Mike Massimo’s twitter stream, which I imagine will be pretty lively today. I’ll see if I can get a movie review from him!

I always leave a TV on in my office tuned to NASA on launch and landing day. It’s a tradition I’ve kept up for 4 years now, and it’s kind of nice that I can do that online as well. The talking you may be hearing is live coverage from Mission Control. You can get this feed yourself from http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/status.html and you can shut it up by scrolling down a bit until you see the box with the talking people.

Here are the current landing opportunities for this weekend. KSC = Kennedy Space Center. EDW = Edwards Air Force Base, NOR, White Sands, New Mexico. Orbit = the number of times the ship has gone round. Looks like tomorrow morning is a good shot!

ORBIT…SITE…LANDING

Saturday, May 23:

180…..KSC….09:16 AM
181…..EDW….10:46 AM
181…..KSC….10:54 AM
182…..EDW….12:24 PM

Sunday, May 24:

196…..EDW….10:01 AM
196…..NOR….10:04 AM
196…..KSC….10:10 AM
197…..EDW….11:39 AM
197…..NOR….11:42 AM
197…..KSC….11:48 AM