That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
Finally in today's spacewalk the S6 truss segment was bolted to the International Space Station by spacewalkers Steve Swanson and Richard Arnold.
The spacewalk is now ongoing since 5 hours and will last for another hour or so.
The coming actions will be the connection of data and power cables to fully setup the S6 truss segment with battery and radiators.
Once the astronauts will be safely inside the station there will be the solar array deployment after which ISS will achieve for the first time its complete power configuration.
This afternoon at 15.21 CET, ESA's GOCE satellite (Gravity and Ocean Circulation Explorer) was launched from Plesetsk atop a Rockot launcher.
Its task is to complete a new mapping of Earth's gravity field distribution with unprecedented accuracy. Such accuracy will be able to analyze and study the difference in altimetry of the ocean surface that is tightly linked with ocean temperature and circulation.
If you like you can enjoy the launch replay HERE
and some other animations HERE
Here we are!
Another mission for Space Shuttle Discovery launched successfully from Kennedy Space Center carrying the last truss segment with the last set of solar arrays for the International Space Station.
This mission will mark a symbolic achievement giving to the station its final power configuration available to support the next few modules left for its completion and six crew member capability.
As for now let's admire the beautiful pictures of this nice launch, made slightly after sunset and because of this, characterized by a strange enlightement once the shuttle was high in the atmosphere. (i.e. in the images you could see the color of External Tank and the clear rotation of the boosters after their separation!).
Here you are a dramatic image of instants after the liftoff!
Enjoy space!
see ya!
Andy
Well,
today I was quite busy beginning the construction of AOCS design model for ESMO reviewing and implementing all the variables I designed and defined in the Model Specification Document before Christmas.
I also chose which variables and features to implement in the design model and what is better to discard in this phase and leave for the next trimmed development that will see the completion of the units ready for the complete ESMO simulator.
Finally the work is starting to give some concrete result and the Simulink blocks for SSR, GYR and AOCS units are taking shape.
When everything will be finished we will start the tests on our design simulator to tune the design and in the meantime we will continue adding features and capabilities and filling what now are "dead connections" between the blocks and inside the subsystems.
With the completion of all the required capabilities and interfaces for our units' blocks we will be able to deliver our final work for the simulator and fill the System Level Requirements and the Units Requirements while editing a new and more detailed version of our design documents (Design Definition Document and Design Justification Document).
It's a hard task to accomplish in only two weeks but today I began well ;-)
Here you are the scheme of what will be the simplified design model:
Hi,
in the last days I adopted my first package on Archlinux User Repository .
It is Freefem++ that I need working on my distribution becuase of an university exam.
So, now, with the nickname of dedalus I will try to matain that package, and in the next weeks I hope to publish also an XFoil PKGBUILD.
In the meantime you can check out the web page of the package, and download the archive in order to compile and install the program simply by unpacking the .tar.gz and feeding makepkg with the PKGBUILD in it.
Enjoy Archlinux and the amazing AUR! ;-)
bYe,
Andy
I'm posting rapidly this fantastic video by ESA, that shows the ISS' astronauts ingress in the newly attached ATV in April.
There is Garrett Reisman who is enjoying weightlessness like a child! :-D
Hello Folks!
I'm finally here again though my spare time is almost nonexistent, to post a solution about a "MATLABonLinux" issue.
Yesterday after the month-long reorganization of my disks and data on my Desktop PC with the reinstallation of ArchLinux as OS... and in the same time after the failure of my old Laptop with the migration to another old laptop of all data and the installation from scratch of ArchLinux also there...
I installed MATLAB R2007a on ArchLinux under a 2.6.25 kernel, with JRE 1.6.0_05-b13 and Xorg 1.4.0.90
After a clean installation and a clean setup with the install_matlab script you have to run after the graphic install... I opened the program to see this message as output of the initialization process as it was just before the prompt:
Warning: Initializing Handle Graphics failed in matlabrc.
This indicates a potentially serious problem in your MATLAB setup, which should be resolved as soon as possible. Error detected was:
MATLAB:badsubscript
Attempted to access monitors(1,:); index out of bounds because size(monitors)=[0,4].
In matlabrc at 108
[x y width height;x y width height]
Width and height of primary and secondary monitors, in pixels. This property contains the width and height of each monitor connnected to your computer. The x and y values for the primary monitor are 0, 0 and the width and height of the monitor are specified in pixels.
The secondary monitor position is specified as
x = primary monitor width + 1
y = primary monitor height + 1
Querying the value of the figure MonitorPosition on a multiheaded system returns the position for each monitor on a separate line.
v = get(0,'MonitorPosition')
v =
x y width height % Primary monitor
x y width height % Secondary monitor
Note that MATLAB sets the value of the ScreenSize property to the combined size of the monitors
monitors = [0,0,1024,768;1025,769,1024,768];
monitors = [0,0,1280,1024;1281,1025,1280,1024];
monitors = get(0, 'MonitorPosition');
monitors = [0,0,1024,768;1025,769,1024,768];
