Astronaut Ron Garan works on assigned tasks during the last scheduled spacewalk of the STS-124 mission specialist. During the six-hour, 33-minute spacewalk, Garan and fellow astronaut Mike Fossum exchanged a depleted Nitrogen Tank Assembly for a new one, removed thermal covers and launch locks from the Kibo laboratory, reinstalled a repaired television camera onto the space station’s left P1 truss,and retrieved samples of a dust-like substance from the left Solar Alpha Rotary Joint for analysis by experts on the ground.

Busy day!

May 22nd and 23rd will be providing some excellent opportunities for seeing the International Space Station from Europe and North America. The details of each sighting vary from place to place, but it is safe to say that the two days and nights will be offering some of the best sightings for a long time.

From Cardiff where I live, you can expect no less than 10 great opportunities over the course of 48 hours! Even as far north as Edinburgh there will be 9 chances. Across North America the frequency of visible transits will also be very high. So if you live in northern Europe or North America, put May 22nd and 23rd in your diary as a good time to look up!

To keep track of these sightings there are many websites to help. Heaven’s Above is a great website that details visible sightings from any location. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch you can use my own web app, LookUp to do much the same thing. If you use Twitter there are several feeds for cities around the world which are useful even if you live up to 100 miles away.

I have also created Google Earth files for tracking the ISS in real time around the Earth. This doesn’t provide viewing predictions, but it is fun to watch it come up to your location and then dash outside to see it pass overhead!

Times vary for all locations but if you’ve never tried to spot the space station then next week would be the time. It’ll be bright, it’ll be obvious and if you miss it, just go outside again an hour or so later and will probably be reappearing.

If anyone has specific requests for parts of the world not yet covered by the Twitter feeds, please email me. I have been looking to add some more to the list, and this seems like a good time.

Continuing my series of posts regarding Google Sky and Google Earth, here is a KMZ file that will let you find some of the prominent and interesting space telescopes and satellites on Google Earth. This file includes real-time position tracking and 1 hour flight paths for:

• Swift Gamma Ray Mission (NASA)
• RoSat (NASA, UK, Germany)
• CoRoT (CNES, ESA)
• GalEx (NASA)
• COBE (NASA)
• IRAS (NASA, UK, Netherlands)
• Envisat (ESA)
• Hubble Space Telescope (NASA, ESA)
• International Space Station (Many)

This KMZ file splits down into several separate files so you can chose to select or deselect any and all of the above objects. Clicking on the satellite or telescope’s icon brings up information about that object with links to more information. Screenshots below for those who like that sort of thing.

To see more Google Earth satellite files check out the general Satellites on Google Earth post and the Chinese Space Debris post. As always, suggestions are welcomed in the comments section. For example, I had created a time-slider dependent satellite tracker but it just ended up being really annoying. Would that be something people would want? Also, as mentioned in a previous comment, I am in the process of creating a tracker that uses a Sketchup model instead of an icon. All thoughts welcome, have fun playing with these.

I was presenting this week’s Astrolunch talk at university. I chose to discuss space debris, and this included a quick overview of the Chinese missile test last year, which create a huge cloud of fragmented debris, much of which is still orbiting the Earth. In January 2007, China launched a surface-to-orbit missile that destroyed a satellite named Fengyun 1C. The act was internationally condemned, though of course no one really punished them.

You can see the debris in this screenshot. Each little Chinese flag is a piece of the satellite that remains in orbit.

If you want to track this debris yourself, you can do so in Google Earth using this handy KMZ file that I’ve created. It uses the same code as my previous efforts for tracking the ISS on Google Earth and tracking satellites on Google Earth in general.

Also, if you’re interested in the talk I gave, you can download the PDF of ‘Space Debris‘.

I wonder if this post will be visible through the Great Firewall of China?

UPDATE: The data used for this Google Earth feed comes directly from NORAD, who provide tracking data for most satellites and other orbiting bodies. I should stress that this only shows the trackable debris. This is only  a percentage of what is up there. Some objects are too small to be tracked by radar and so do not appear.

As if Canadarm wasn’t the best name of anything in space (it’s a Canadian arm for the International Space Station), the Canadian Space Agency has now put Dextre into space. What is Dextre? Well he’s the hand to Canadarm’s arm.

The team that built him have kept referring to him as a person despite Dextre being a very important, and serious, addition to the ISS. Endeavour’s recent mission to the orbiting space station was partly to deliver Dextre and install him for use.

After Endeavour leaves the station in a few days, Canadarm (well technically now Canadarm2) will pick Dextre up by his head and put him to use in a series of tests. He is designed to perform tasks that astronauts would normally have to do during risky spacewalks. Now, the astronauts on board can carry out routine maintainence tasks without leaving the safety of the station’s modules. Dextre is even designed to be operated from the same controls as Canadarm2. He can also be operated remotely, from the Earth.

The need for Dextre has arisen as the ISS has become larger and thus needs more frequent repairs and maintenance work. Also, NASA will be retiring the space shuttle fleet in 2010 so the frequency of visits to the station will reduce and robotic and remote work will become more of a requirement.

If you want to hear more about Dextre, I recommend the fabulous Quirks and Quarks science show from CBC. You can download Quirks via a podcast or listen via radio in Canada and via Sirius satellite radio. They did an interview about Dextre in their March 1st show.

Or visit the Canadian Space Agency Dextre website.

Orbiting Frog has been a busy place in 2008! We are only a small way into the year but already Orbiting Frog seems to have overspilled to the extent to which I feel the need to recap and regroup. So just in case you missed anything, here is a quick overview of what’s been going on here in the past couple of months.

My experimentation with Google Earth and Google Sky has led to several items being created. In Google Earth, the ISS Locator, 100 Brightest Satellites Tracker and the Advanced Any Satellite Tracker have all been very popular and downloaded a combined 5,600 times already. In Google Sky my SCUBA data layer has now been access over 1,500 times and for some reason has inspired several emails - thanks for those! There is also last year’s IRAS 100 Micron all sky coverage for Google Sky which I had forgotten all about.

The LookUp iPhone and iPod Touch app has also been popular. Apple featured it as a Staff Pick and it hung around in the Top 10 for some time. It is now accessed about 2,000 times a day and a recent TUAW bump has kept it visible on the Apple web apps site.

The week of the lunar eclipse led me to post a video on what would be seen. I hosted the video on YouTube to reduce server load and was quite surprised however when it became one of the top videos of the week. You can have quite laugh reading the comments on the YouTube page. No one seemed to grasp that it was made on a computer and several accuse me of tricking them.

The Orbiting Frog Shop launched not too long ago and has been selling lots of t-shirts. More designs will appear all the time so keep your eyes peeled, and if anyone spots one in the wild, I’d love to hear about it.
I have now joined the crew at the Carnival of Space by hosting the 40th edition. The Carnival is a great place to pick up new RSS feeds and bloggers.

Finally I’d just like to thank everyone for taking such an interest. Thanks for all the emails and for actually reading the blog. Now I’m off to create a real blog post (i.e. not about myself) before having some lovely Swiss lunch. Yum.

UPDATE: New Google Earth tracking files for Space Telescopes are now up.

Hot on the heels of putting all the SCUBA data onto Google Sky, I am now sharing some Google Earth goodies. The KML files below will allow you to view the location of any satellite on Google Earth with latitude, longitude and altitude positions updated every 30 seconds.

These Google Earth overlays use the NORAD two-line element (TLE) datasets that are published via the Celestrak website and are used by satellite enthusiasts the world over. I could not find them for Google Earth so have made them available myself.

There are three files that can be downloaded:

1) ISS Locator - A simple file that just tracks the position of the most popular and asked after satellite, the manned International Space Station. Shows the next 2 hours of flight path and the approximate size of the viewing horizon of the ISS (i.e. the area of the Earth’s surface for which the ISS is potentially visible).

2) 100+ Brightest Objects - This file uses Celestrak’s 100 or so brightest objects TLE file to show the locations on Google Earth of between 100-200 of the better known and easier to spot satellites.

3) Advanced Tracker - By default this KML file tracks the ISS from the 100+ file above. However it allows you to change the source TLE and satellite ID to any that you like, thus making it the first Google Earth addition that allows you to track any satellite at all! Instructions are found in the file by clicking its name in Google Earth. This layer also shows the viewing horizon and 2 hour flight path.

Download ISS Locator, 100+ Brightest Objects and Advanced Tracker.

Download All three files together in a zipped archive.

Look Up (v1.0) is an iPhone (or iPod touch) web application that can tell you when to look out for satellites in the night sky. It covers pretty much anywhere in the world and predicts transits for the International Space Station, Hubble, Envisat, Genesis 1 and 2 and for a short while will predict appearances by the ailing US spy satellite USA-193, which has been in the news recently.

Not too long ago I put the data from my Over somewhere Twitter feeds into an iPhone edible format. Well that was a very restrictive way of doing things. This site is essentially an iPhone port of the Heaven’s Above website. I found HA hard to use on the iPhone and so this seemed a logical move. I am utilising Yahoo!’s geocode API as well as the EarthTools collection to grab details on timezones and lat/long data for inputted cities and countries.

Using the site should be fairly self-evident. You input your city and country (or city and US state) and then chose the satellite you’d like to try and spot. Hit ‘Search’ and there will be a pause while the script goes to do its magic. All being well, you should then see a list of upcoming transits with details of where and when to look.

Each transit is colour-coded by a traffic light system. Red dots signify that a pass is not worth looking for. Yellow dots are reasonable passes and green dots are excellent (either because they are bright or high in the sky).

For a short time, Heaven’s Above is featuring the ailing US spy satellite, USA-193. This means that Look Up can also tell you where and when to spot this object, which recently made the headlines.

Have a go! This should also work in Safari on any computer. I have not tested it in Firefox or IE. As always, feel free to leave comments here if you have any suggestions or ideas for improvements. I was thinking of incorporating weather predictions for the transits and the ability to search for any objects that may be easy to spot on a particular evening.

To add the app to your iPhone or iPod touch, just navigate to http://orbitingfrog.com/lookup.

Okay this gets a bit tenuous, but what the hell? If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch and live in any of my Over Twitter feed cities (Aix, Birmingham, Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Indianapolis, Honolulu, Mauna Kea, Manchester, Milton Keynes, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney) then you might want to add this next item to your device.

I wanted to make an iPhone app and so used the same database that is used for my Over… feeds. It works pretty nicely and I even have a lovely icon that will place itself on your home page properly. Consider it beta, of course. Basically you can browse by city and this will tell you all the transits that are going on in the next 10 days.

http://orbitingfrog.com/iphone

I am still working on a way to add any city to these services but to do so properly will require some hefty calculations, which I’m not sure I have time for right now. Anyway, all comments welcome on this iPhone/iPod web app.

This is a nice link from Digg about concepts for space stations. just goes to show how varied and wide the shapes and sizes for space-faring vehicles could get, if only we could get to the future and build them already!

read more | digg story

The Over Cardiff and related Twitter feeds should now only issue warnings when the weather is fine. This has been achieved using Yahoo! Weather’s RSS API, which returns the weather for each location when the script checks for visible ISS passes.

In case you don’t know, Over Cardiff is one of a collection of Twitter feeds designed to alert users local to an area of upcoming visible passes by the ISS and Hubble. More info found on a previous blog post.

If the weather is deemed either clear, fair or partly cloudy then the Twitter feeds will still report an upcoming transit from that location. They will no longer send alerts when the weather is said to be mostly cloudy, overcast or other inclement conditions such as fog, snow and rain.

I finally caught the Space Station in Cardiff last night.

Having rained on me all day, it finally cleared up and was almost cloudless at both times for the ISS going over. Caught a few crappy photos, one of which is right here. You can see the ISS as a little dot, just above the chimney, about the bump into my TV aerial.

In addition to putting the Heaven’s Above transits of the ISS and Hubble into Twitter feeds for 14 cities (so far), I have also put them in the sidebar right here at Orbiting Frog. You should see the upcoming visible transit on the right. These updates just cover the cities that I have so far added to my list.

read more | heaven’s above

I read a while ago on Astronomy Blog that there was a Twitter feed called About London (developers’ blog) for International Space Station (ISS) passes overhead, as well as some other things. Basically every time the ISS was due to pass over London a Tweet would appear saying when it was due and where to find it in the sky. Nice idea. But we don’t all live in London and I wanted to make one for my own fair Cardiff.

So here is the Twitter address for Over Cardiff which will currently tell you when the ISS or Hubble are going to be visible: http://www.twitter.com/overcardiff

Twitter is great because its simple. You can receive notifications either by text or IM - or just online by RSS or the Twitter website. I have been wanting to learn a bit more PHP recently so this seemed perfect. While I was at it it seemed easy enough to make some for other cities as well. They are all listed below.

Name changed to Over Somewhere to distinguish this from Above London and associated projects.

This is all new to me so I welcome comments and thoughts from people. Also this is all on the proviso that it may break for a little bit. I think I’ve tested it but in my own experience these things are never tested until they’re used.

Over Aix-en-Provence
Over Birmingham
Over Belfast
Over Cardiff
Over Dublin
Over Edinburgh
Over Hong Kong
Over Indianapolis
Over Milton Keynes
Over Manchester
Over New York
Over Paris
Over San Francisco
Over Sydney

If you any other city requests, then leave the comments here and I’ll see what I can do. The current cities are based more of where I have family and friends than anything else.

I will post an explanation eventually including the PHP for how this was done. Basically I scrape Heaven’s over and then run a separate script for check for upcoming transits.

Enjoy your Twittering.

Attention Cardiff citizens - I know you’re out there - the ISS is coming to our city. Well honestly, the ISS passes over us all the time but there are two nice upcoming passes that are worth keeping an eye our for because they are bright, conveniently timed and easy to spot. There is also the slight chance it will be clear and you will actually see it happen.

Tonight on Monday June 11th the ISS will rise at 11:21pm almost due West and pass directly overhead until it vanishes into the Earth’s shadow in the East at 11:29pm. It will move very quickly overhead at a magnitude of -1.0 which is about as bright as the brightest stars you can see. It will of course fly across the whole sky, compared to those stars, in just 8 minutes and that is what gives it away.

If you miss that pass for any reason, on Wednesday June 13th almost exactly the same thing will happen again. This time it will start and finish at 10:27pm and 10:35pm respectively and will be just fractionally dimmer at magnitude -0.9. That still puts it among the bright objects up there at the time.

All of this is made extra cool by knowing that the shuttle Atlantis and its crew are currently up there working on the space station, installing solar panels and making space walks.

Thanks to Heaven’s Above for the great service they provide. You can finid out when and where to spy the ISS and an array of other objects over at their website.

ISSOriginally uploaded by jarguel.

Haven’t seen much that I’ve liked in the Astrophotography group on Flickr lately but I went trawling earlier and found this lovely capture of the ISS from someone’s back garden. Thought it was worth sharing.