Cross your fingers…. The Redcoats are about to land on the Red Planet. Check out the Beagle 2 website to keep track of how they do. ETA is Christmas Day, 2:54am GMT. Thanks again to Glen for the keen link – also if you haven’t already, check out the call sign the probe is scheduled to play. Pretty neat.

Planning a trip through space today? Well, why not check the weather? You never know when those magnetic storms might hit!

This is more a note to myself than anything, but you might find it interesting as well. JPL has put together an overview called the Basics of Space Flight, covering topics like orbital mechanics, experiments, and communication. It’s supposed to have a bent toward unmanned missions, but a lot of the principles are the same. I look forward to reading it.

From Spaceman Glen. These are very cool. The first one has a giganto java applet and I had trouble getting it to load, but if you have a decent-sized computer, it’s worth it – It’s Molecular Expressions’ Power of Ten. It’s basically a site that starts you out in the Milky Way 10 million light years from earth, then moves you 10 times closer and 10 times closer and you eventually get subatomic inside a leaf on earth.

The other one also rocks, if you like space and stuff. It’s from Australia and it’s called The Best of Hubble. It takes you on a tour of some amazing Hubble images with some neat spacey music. Very cool. Very, very cool.

Glen the space historian writes:

Here is a link to a very good article on the Columbia accident investigation.