Another Hurricane Early picture

Another picture taken by astronaut Doug Wheelock

Hurricane Earl Photographed From Space

An astronaut on the International Space Station has photographed Hurricane Earl as it heads towards the U.S. coast as a powerful Category 4 storm.

American astronaut Douglas Wheelock of NASA has been photographing hurricanes from windows on the International Space Station and posting them on Twitter. Hurricane Earl is his latest target, though he also caught stunning views of Hurricane Danielle recently. 

"Hurricane Earl is gathering some strength," Wheelock wrote Tuesday on Twitter, where he is chronicling his space mission under the name Astro_Wheels. "It is incredible what a difference a day makes when you're dealing with this force of nature. Please keep a watchful eye on this one ... not sure if Earl will go quietly into the night like Danielle."

Astronaut William Lenoir, Who Flew on 1st Operational Shuttle Mission, Dies

Former NASA astronaut William "Bill" Lenoir, who flew aboard the first operational mission of the space shuttle in November 1982, died Saturday at age 71.

According to sources close to his family, Lenoir died after suffering head injuries during a bicycle accident Thursday.

Lenoir, who was selected by NASA for its sixth astronaut group and second class of "scientist-astronauts" in 1967, did not fly in space until 15 years later as a member of the STS-5 crew.

Lenoir served as the first flight engineer during the Nov. 11, 1982 launch, aiding commander Vance Brand and pilot Robert Overmyer from his seat on Columbia's flight deck. Five days later, when it came time to return to Earth, he traded places with fellow mission specialist Joseph Allen, becoming the first to experience a shuttle re-entry from the orbiter's middeck.

Lenoir and Allen were scheduled to establish another first together – the first spacewalk from the shuttle. But the outing was delayed a day when Lenoir became ill, was and ultimately canceled due to mechanical issues with both of their spacesuits.

The STS-5 mission successfully deployed its two communication satellites, the first commercial shuttle payloads, leading to the crew displaying a sign dubbing themselves the "Ace Moving Company" with the motto, "We Deliver."

After landing on Nov. 16 at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Lenoir and his three crewmates had logged more than 2.1 million miles (nearly 3.4 million km) in space. For Lenoir, the mission's 81 orbits would be his only spaceflight experience.

Lenoir was offered another mission, the STS-61A flight in October 1985 that flew the German-managed D1 Spacelab aboard orbiter Challenger, but he ultimately declined citing the time that training would require he would be away from his family and his desire to start a new career.

Russia plans to start cosmodrome work in 2011

The construction of a new rocket launch site in Russia's Far East will begin next year, the country's top space official said in a scientific council meeting.

Officials hope the Vostochny Cosmodrome will be ready to assume spaceflight duties by 2018, giving Russia a domestic spaceport for human space missions to replace the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, said all decisions have been taken to ensure construction of the cosmodrome starts in 2011.

Perminov made the comments in a meeting of the Scientific and Technical Council, according to the space agency's press service.

The Russian space agency's plans through 2015 call for development of the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur region of southeast Russia. The new launch site will be near the Russia-China border.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced in July an $800 million spending package for construction at Vostochny over the next three years, but that figure is a fraction of the projected total cost of the facility.

Vostochny, which means eastern in Russian, would host flights of the planned Rus-M rocket, which engineers are designing to launch a proposed next-generation manned spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz capsule.

Mars Crater Contains Water Ice

A fresh crater on Mars has revealed a hidden cache of frozen water in some of the latest photos from a powerful NASA spacecraft.

A recent false color image from NASA's  Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter clearly shows a patch of Mars water ice at the bottom of a 20-foot (6-meter) wide crater in the Martian surface. The photo came from the orbiter's high-resolution HiRISE camera.

The young crater is in the northern hemisphere of Mars. Scientists suspect it formed only recently, sometime between April 2004 and January of this year, said Nathan Bridges, a HiRISE science team member at the University of Arizona.

Bridges said the icy crater is farther south than some other sightings of buried water ice.  It appeared in one of hundreds of Mars photos taken between June 6 and July 7 of this year.

 "It's showing we're getting ice pretty far south," Bridges said. "As we continue to look at these things it's a good way to determine where shallow ice is on Mars." 

The  ice patch covers an area of up to 20 square feet (2 square meters). It "is probably at the same depth and has a similar origin to that excavated by the Phoenix lander back in 2008," he wrote in an image description.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander touched down in the Martian arctic in May 2008 and found evidence of water ice just beneath the surface using a small scoop at the end of its robotic arm.

This also is not the first time ice-filled Martian craters have been found and photographed by the HiRISE camera.

The orbiting spacecraft first spotted exposed ice in Martian craters in August 2008. The ice did not last, it ultimately turned straight into vapor in a process known as sublimation. There is no definitive proof of liquid water on Mars today.