Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

I’ve been at the Spaceward Games all week and am leaving tomorrow morning. All my video, pictures and posts are on the Space Elevator Reference. SpaceRef was a media sponsor and we had our webcams going for most of the week. I’ll be a amking some time lapse movies when I get a chance. It’s been fun but the weather has not been cooperating. The games are going an extra day and I won’t be around to cover it though as I really do have to head home.

Working the weekend turned out to be quite productive with Keith and I coming up with new ideas for On Orbit as well me solving the programming puzzle of getting our content management system (CMS) Intercat working our new social news service Mercury. Now whenever one of our editors adds a story using our CMS it automatically gets categorized and added to Mercury. Along with our news stories being added to Mercury any member will be able to add stories and have users comment and vote on them.

One of the smaller services I’m trying to get ready for the launch is what I’ve called dTwitter. Basically this is Drupal module that allows users to view their Tweets on On Orbit as well as updating their Tweets.

Keith and I made the decision to move back the launch of On Orbit to September 12th. Since I’m on travel between the 5th and 11th it made no sense to launch on the 4th when I won’t be around to closely monitor things.

Of note to those of you interested in NASA, the young crowd at Ames has started a new blog called Open NASA. It’s an offsite blog geared towards “open content transparency and participatory engagement at NASA”. It’s worth keeping track of. They get it.

The countdown clock is reset, we are now at T-minus 16 days before On Orbit launch to our alpha users.

Lior Ron, Product Manager for Google Earth announced today on the Google LatLong blog the new release today of the Sky in Google Earth. In a break from programming I gave it a try. At first glance it works well.

“Today, I’m excited to announce we are launching Sky in Google Earth. You can now explore the universe from the comfort of your chair. Zoom in to distant galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away, explore the constellations, see the planets in motion, witness a supernova explosion; it’s like having a giant, virtual telescope at your command — your own personal planetarium!”

I’m working weekends now to get On Orbit ready. This weekend I created the new Video area and made some breakthrough’s with the Drupal code. I’m debating whether there’s time to create some new modules. I’d post them as open source on the Drupal site if I do.

The biggest obstacle to launching the site, other than the time constraints, is that I want to launch with the new collaborative area ready. I’m still deciding on what tools to make available to participating organizations.

Unfortunately I can’t spend as much time as I would like working On Orbit. Other responsibilities abound including the post HMP field season review with the Mars Institute team and then a meeting on September 6th in Montreal with the Canadian Space Agency.

Robert Richards was on the Space Show yesterday and touched on several topics including the upcoming Phoenix launch to Mars, the International Space University which he co-founded and the company he works for Optech which is participating in Phoenix as well as Canadian space industry topics.

I have to mention that one of the great products that Optech produces is a LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). They just don’t get enough credit for producing this great technology. LIDAR is a is an optical remote sensing technology that measures properties of scattered light to find range and/or other information of a distant target. The Phoenix mission incorporates a LIDAR into the Meteorological Station (MET) science instrument. An Optech LIDAR is currently being used by the NASA Ames K-10 rover team at the Haughton-Mars Project Research Station on Devon Island. As well a LIDAR is included in the PRIME (Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration) mission instrument package that is in the concept study phase being undertaken by Optech, the Mars Institute (my institution), MDA for the Canadian Space Agency.

From the Space Show on the interview:

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