GOES-13 goes up

GOES-13NOAA’s GOES-13 Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral into geosynchronous orbit to monitor weather patterns over the United States. It will be held in reserve until 2010, when it will be moved to the GOES-EAST position to replace GOES-12, which is suffering chronic attitude control thruster glitches. GOES-13 is yet another evolutionary step up in the GOES satellite hardware, but it will suffer its own share of hardware issues, including a series of inexplicable faults which will cause brief losses of weather coverage, and a later fault which disables infrared imaging capability. Some of these hardware failures will be attributed to micrometeoroid collisions.

Battlestar Galactica Season 2 (soundtrack)

La-La Land Records releases Bear McCreary’s soundtrack from the second season of Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica reboot. The second season soundtrack CD continues to show off the series’ impressive musical palette – ranging from Middle Eastern influences to hard rock – as well as new interpretations of the main theme from the 1970s iteration of Galactica. Read more

2006 Robot Hall Of Fame inductees

MariaFive new robots, both fictional and real, are inducted into Carnegie Mellon University’s Robot Hall Of Fame. With C-3PO actor Anthony Daniels presenting the awards, the quintet of new inductees consists of:

  1. Maria (1927, from Metropolis)
  2. Gort (1951, from The Day The Earth Stood Still)
  3. SCARA (1978, Yamanashi University – industrial small-component assembly robot)
  4. AIBO (1999, Sony – consumer grade robot dog with artificial intelligence)
  5. David (2001, from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence)

STS-121

DiscoveryNASA launches Space Shuttle Discovery for the first time in nearly a year for a second “Return to Flight” mission to the International Space Station, testing more safety procedures and new materials developed since the July 2005 flight (which still required repairs to be conducted in orbit). Aboard Discovery are Commander Steven Lindsey, Pilot Mark Kelly, and mission specialists Stephanie Wilson, Michael Fossum, Piers Sellers, Thomas Reiter and Lisa Nowak. Reiter remains aboard the station, bumping its crew up to three people for the first time since 2003.

Doctor Who: Doomsday

Doctor WhoThe 725th episode of Doctor Who (the 27th since the series’ revival) airs on BBC1. Tracy-Ann Oberman guest stars. This is the conclusion of the second season of the new series, and sees Billie Piper’s exit as a series regular. The end of the episode introduces Catherine Tate as future companion Donna Noble, leading into the 2006 Christmas episode. This episode is the first to pit the Daleks against the Cybermen. Read more Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast

Boarding The Enterprise

Boarding The EnterpriseBenbella Books releases the non-fiction Star Trek essay anthology “Boarding The Enterprise”, edited by and featuring contributions from David Gerrold. Other contributors include Norman Spinrad, D.C. Fontana, Paul Levinson and Eric Greene. (theLogBook.com webmaster Earl Green aided with this book’s fact-checking and editing.) Read more

My own private space station: Genesis I

Genesis IA scaled-down proof-of-concept model of an inflatible space station module designed by NASA in the 1990s, Genesis I is launched (with no occupants, or, indeed, an airlock to allow access) by Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace. Genesis I is a testbed for a privately-operated space station whose pressurized modules (inflated from within by the supply of breathable air) would be much cheaper to launch than pre-fabricated structures such as the International Space Station. With several cameras monitoring every angle of the station, the module fully inflates in just ten minutes.

Stargate SG-1: Flesh And Blood

Stargate SG-1The 194th episode of Stargate SG-1 airs on the Sci-Fi Channel, starring Ben Browder, Amanda Tapping, Christopher Judge, Claudia Black, Beau Bridges, and Michael Shanks. Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager) guest stars in the season ten premiere. Read more