If you’re going to say goodbye to the International Space Station….

LA Times reports on the latest low-budget, off-the-shelf NASA experiment, sending three smartphones into orbit:

The three Google-HTC Nexus One smartphones are circling Earth at an altitude of about 150 miles and will burn up on re-entry within the next two weeks, NASA said. The smartphones, which are encased in 4-inch metal cubes, are running the Android operating system.

The [...]

The Atlantic reveals a culinary secret of near-Earth orbit. Astronauts love shrimp cocktail – and here’s why:

Without gravity to pull blood toward the feet, especially during the first few days in space, “your head sort of inflates like someone is squeezing the bottom of a balloon,” explains current astronaut Chris Hadfield. The results are clogged sinuses and the [...]

This came from a series of supplements in California textbooks in the 1960s – the peak of the Space Race.

This is an image of promise. There is a better tomorrow out there in the void. That’s what it’s promising. A better tomorrow, a broader horizon… and some trippy lightshows.

[via So Much Science, though they found it [...]

Does this sound schmaltzy? Usually things with a full choir and a key change after the bridge sound schmaltzy. I honestly can’t tell – judgement just flew right out the window. I think from the point at which Hadfield held his guitar pick up to the camera and left it there, hanging in zero gravity.

We are living in the [...]

No, he’s not doing *that* on the ISS. The commander is, like The Postal Service, making music via a long-distance collaboration… only his is with the earthbound Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies:

It’s actually really bizarre. We’ll get off on some other tangents, like I bought an old truck and he was telling me his dad restores old [...]

New Scientist opens wide to tell us Mars Rover Curiosity is ready to drill into the Red Planet:

Chemical analysis from one of the rover’s remote-sensing cameras shows that the veins are hydrated calcium sulphates, possibly gypsum. They probably formed when water flowed through fractures in the bedrock and left dissolved material behind behind.

The find takes NASA’s mantra [...]

That’s it. Canada’s space hero did this on the International Space Station.

You can hear the slight buzz of the station’s fans in the background.

I DON’T MIND AT ALL.

MIT Technology Review crunches the numbers and figures that anyone who spends three years on Mars is going to witness an H-bomb-sized asteroid collision:

Today. William Bruckman and pals at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao do exactly this kind of analysis but with a twist. They derive impact probabilities for Earth but also for Mars. Their conclusion [...]