Beginner's luck?

An interesting report from the Planetary Society notes that students directing a camera aboard the NASA Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft have taken images of a surprising cluster of dark-colored boulders on the Martian surface whose appearance cannot be easily explained.

The students doing the imaging were participants in the Red Rover Goes to Mars Training Mission (sponsored by LEGO), and had been selected from over ten thousand entrants worldwide. The team - comprised of students from Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, Taiwan, and the United States - gathered in Carlsbad, California during the week of February 11-17, and details are at the Red Rover site above.

Cheers...

For later perusal...

Yuri's Night appears to be in a category of its own.

Interesting collection of sponsors.

Cheers...

Long day...

I drifted off to sleep last night at around 8:30 pm almost immediately and slept well, waking up feeling as if I'd slept for a good five hours. The alarm read 10:20 pm or thereabouts, so I turned over and went back to sleep.

I woke up again shortly after 1 am, and again at 2:20 am. Each time, I felt rested and refreshed, but fell asleep pretty easily again, except for the last time, which was close enough to my 2:30 am wakeup to make trying to snooze my way to the alarm clock a losing proposition.

To make a long story short, my body started crashing around 9 am while I was working the air-to-ground loops, and I didn't recover until about noon. Yech. I got home around 3 pm and cleaned the place up a bit, in anticipation of Galina's arrival, but there appears to be a weather system between here and Colorado, and doubtless, she's been slowed by it.

The redocking went well. My partner in crime, Paul K., and I arrived shortly after the start of the maneuver, and I picked up the interpretation as Yuri Gidzenko maneuvered the Soyuz back from the Service Module and then proceeded to align the vehicle with the FGB's -Y axis for redocking.

All the while, the MCC in Moscow was unable to establish contact with the Soyuz, so they kept calling the craft over and over again (and I kept interpreting the call over and over). From time to time, Gidzenko would pick up a microphone and call down his progress, prefacing his statements with "MCC, if you can hear me, we are....", clearly indicating that he was not receiving any communications from the ground.

Eventually the maneuver was complete, and everyone set about the task of getting through the timeline, which I think the crew did with time to spare. Paul and I went home a half hour past our assigned time, though, since the last comm pass before crew sleep occurred in that last half hour. Once the coverage was past (about 30 seconds past), I was on the flight director's loop requesting permission to be dismissed, which was granted immediately.

In other news, there is a buzz at JSC regarding the imminent departure of the center's long-time director, George Abbey. In his book Dragonfly, which was about the Shuttle-Mir program that was the predecessor to the ISS program, author Brian Burrough made Abbey out to be a nasty, universally hated guy at JSC.

From my personal experience, I know that Abbey is a demanding taskmaster, and it may very well be that he'd not too popular with some folks, having ruffled a few feathers over the years. Personally, I've never had a problem working with him, and if results count for anything, he's done a heck of a good job during his tenure as Director.

Tomorrow is another stint at air-to-ground, though it starts at the usual (and more civilized) time of 7:30 am. I've already gotten word that Monday's assignment will be an all-day simulation. Another day...another dollar.

Cheers...