Photos of the Day: Giada at The Grove...

Last Tuesday, I went to The Grove near Beverly Hills to attend a discussion and book signing by Giada De Laurentiis...the food connoisseur who writes, owns a few restaurants and also hosted her own TV show, Giada at Home, on the Food Network. Laurentiis was so nice and outgoing in person! During a discussion of her newest publication Giada's Italy, she also answered questions by attendees about such things as to whether her young daughter Jade wanted to be a chef like her [she doesn't, but Jade enjoys cooking and likes holding a knife in her hand to chop things (it was a lot funnier when her mom explained it)], and why Giada doesn't write cocktail books (they don't sell as well as regular cookbooks do). Laurentiis also answered a fan's question about what was the best place to visit in Italy (I forgot what she said), and that the best Italian restaurant to dine at in New York City is Antica Pesa. Very cool.



There are so many enticing recipes in Giada's Italy. Crab arancini. Pappa al pomodoro. Positano pizzas. Creamy sweet corn with pancetta. Lots of dishes in Laurentiis' book that I wanna grub on. Of course, I'd have to be careful with the ones whose ingredients may be high in oxalate (this is Italian food, so that's gonna be challenging)— Lousy kidney stone issue. Anyways, this is my Blog entry to end the month of April on... Happy Monday!

Back in the Day: My HALO Tandem Skydive...

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."
-Leonardo da Vinci



Five years ago today, I conducted a HALO jump above Whiteville, Tennessee...from an altitude of 29,190 feet. Here are a couple of photos from my webpage that's devoted to this awesome jump; you can check out the rest of the images in the link provided below. Chances are I'll re-post these pics again in 2023—to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of my HALO tandem skydive! Carry on.

LINK: Click here for more images from my HALO tandem skydive















"Sometimes you have to go up so high to realize just how small you really are."
-Felix Baumgartner (October 14, 2012)

InSight Update: T-Minus 1 Week Till Launch!

USAF 30th Space Wing / Aaron Taubman

Just thought I'd share these pics of NASA's InSight Mars lander as it was recently encapsulated by the payload fairing of the Atlas V rocket that will send it to the Red Planet on May 5 (at 4:05 AM, Pacific Daylight Time). I'm trying to decide if I'm going to get up hours before dawn and watch the launch on NASA TV (for full coverage of lift-off through spacecraft separation), or drive to a local park and see if I can spot the rocket soaring into space from Los Angeles County. In case you're wondering, InSight will be the first interplanetary spacecraft to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base 100+ miles from where I live here in Southern California...as opposed to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Awesome.


USAF 30th Space Wing


USAF 30th Space Wing


USAF 30th Space Wing / Daniel Herrera


USAF 30th Space Wing / Leif Heimbold


USAF 30th Space Wing / Leif Heimbold

Photos of the Day: A Brief Visit to Mexico...

Just thought I'd share these pics that I took one month ago today...when the ship I traveled on during an 11-day cruise, the Norwegian Jade, made a 7 to 8-hour stop at Costa Maya on the eastern coast of Mexico. I took these images before and after I visited the Mayan ruins in Chacchoben on the same day (you can see the photos in the link below). Costa Maya was the sixth and final port that the Norwegian Jade docked at before we returned to Miami on March 23. As you can see, this is a beautiful locale... Cancun is a 4 to 5-hour trip from this resort. (I have no intention of going to Cancun.) Hope y'all are having a great weekend!

PS: Six of these ten photos were taken with my Nikon D3300 DSLR camera. Guess which ones?

LINK: Additional photos I took on my cruise to Central America

InSight Update: The Mars Lander's Two Rideshare Partners Will Soon Be Ready for Launch...

NASA / JPL - Caltech

NASA Engineers Dream Big with Small Spacecraft (News Release)

Many of NASA's most iconic spacecraft towered over the engineers who built them: think Voyagers 1 and 2, Cassini or Galileo -- all large machines that could measure up to a school bus.

But in the past two decades, mini-satellites called CubeSats have made space accessible to a new generation. These briefcase-sized boxes are more focused in their abilities and have a fraction of the mass -- and cost -- of some past titans of space.

In May, engineers will be watching closely as NASA launches its first pair of CubeSats designed for deep space. The twin spacecraft are called Mars Cube One, or MarCO, and were built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Both MarCO spacecraft will be hitching a ride on the same rocket launching InSight, NASA's next robotic lander headed for Mars. The MarCOs are intended to follow InSight on its cruise through space; if they survive the journey, each is equipped with a folding high-gain antenna to relay data about InSight as it enters the Martian atmosphere and lands.

The MarCOs won't produce any science of their own, and aren't required for InSight to send its data back home (the lander will rely on NASA's Mars orbiters for that, in addition to communicating directly with antennas on Earth). But the twins will be a crucial first test of CubeSat technology beyond Earth orbit, demonstrating how they could be used to further explore the solar system.

"These are our scouts," said Andy Klesh of JPL, MarCO's chief engineer. "CubeSats haven't had to survive the intense radiation of a trip to deep space before, or use propulsion to point their way towards Mars. We hope to blaze that trail."

The official names of these two scouts are "MarCO-A" and "MarCO-B." But to the team that built them, they're "Wall-E" and "Eva" -- nicknames based on Pixar characters. Both MarCOs use a compressed gas commonly found in fire extinguishers to push themselves through space, the same way Wall-E did in his 2008 film.

Survival is far from guaranteed. As the saying goes: space is hard. The first challenge will be switching on. The MarCO batteries were last checked in March by Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems of Irvine, California, which inserted each CubeSat into a special dispenser that will propel it into space. Those batteries will be used to deploy each CubeSat's solar arrays, with the hope that enough power will be left over to turn on their radios. If power is too low, the MarCO team may hear silence until each spacecraft is more fully charged.

If both MarCOs make the journey, they'll test a method of communications relay that could act as a "black box" for future Mars landings, helping engineers understand the difficult process of getting spacecraft to safely touch down on the Red Planet. Mars landings are notoriously hard to stick.

The MarCOs could also prove that CubeSats are ready to go beyond Earth. CubeSats were first developed to teach university students about satellites. Today, they're a major commercial technology, providing data on everything from shipping routes to environmental changes.

NASA scientists are eager to explore the solar system using CubeSats. JPL even has its own CubeSat clean room, where several flight projects have been built, including the MarCOs. For young engineers, the thrill is building something that could potentially reach Mars in just a matter of years rather than a decade.

"We're a small team, so everyone gets experience working on multiple parts of the spacecraft," Klesh said. "You learn everything about building, testing and flying along the way. We're inventing every day at this point."

The MarCOs were built by JPL, which manages InSight and MarCO for NASA. They were funded by both JPL and NASA's Science Mission Directorate. A number of commercial suppliers provided unique technologies for the MarCOs.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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NASA / JPL - Caltech

TESS Begins Its Historic Quest to Search for Thousands of New Alien Worlds Beyond Our Solar System...

SpaceX

NASA Planet Hunter on Its Way to Orbit (Press Release)

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has launched on the first-of-its-kind mission to find worlds beyond our solar system, including some that could support life.

TESS, which is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, lifted off at 6:51 p.m. EDT Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. At 7:53 p.m., the twin solar arrays that will power the spacecraft successfully deployed.

“We are thrilled TESS is on its way to help us discover worlds we have yet to imagine, worlds that could possibly be habitable, or harbor life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “With missions like the James Webb Space Telescope to help us study the details of these planets, we are ever the closer to discovering whether we are alone in the universe.”

Over the course of several weeks, TESS will use six thruster burns to travel in a series of progressively elongated orbits to reach the Moon, which will provide a gravitational assist so that TESS can transfer into its 13.7-day final science orbit around Earth. After approximately 60 days of check-out and instrument testing, the spacecraft will begin its work.

“One critical piece for the science return of TESS is the high data rate associated with its orbit,” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge. “Each time the spacecraft passes close to Earth, it will transmit full-frame images taken with the cameras. That’s one of the unique things TESS brings that was not possible before.”

For this two-year survey mission, scientists divided the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will use four unique wide-field cameras to map 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky during its first year of observations and 13 sectors of the northern sky during the second year, altogether covering 85 percent of the sky.

TESS will be watching for phenomena called transits. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its star from the observer’s perspective, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. More than 78 percent of the approximately 3,700 confirmed exoplanets have been found using transits.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft found more than 2,600 exoplanets, most orbiting faint stars between 300 and 3,000 light-years from Earth, using this same method of watching for transits. TESS will focus on stars between 30 and 300 light-years away and 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets.

The brightness of these target stars will allow researchers to use spectroscopy, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water, and other key molecules, in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planets’ capacity to harbor life.

“The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come,” said Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research.”

Through the TESS Guest Investigator Program, the worldwide scientific community will be able to conduct research beyond TESS’s core mission in areas ranging from exoplanet characterization to stellar astrophysics, distant galaxies and solar system science.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. George Ricker, of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, serves as principal investigator for the mission. TESS’s four wide-field cameras were developed by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Additional partners include Orbital ATK, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.

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SpaceX


SpaceX


NASA


NASA

The Launch of TESS Has Been Delayed...

SpaceX

Today's initial launch attempt for NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida has been called off due to SpaceX requesting additional time to analyze data for the Falcon 9 rocket's guidance, navigation and control systems. The next launch attempt is targeted for this Wednesday, April 18, at 6:51 PM, Eastern Daylight Time (3:51 PM, Pacific Daylight Time). It's all good.

Standing down today to conduct additional GNC analysis, and teams are now working towards a targeted launch of @NASA_TESS on Wednesday, April 18.

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 16, 2018

TESS Update: T-Minus 1 Day Till Launch!

ESO / M. Kornmesser

NASA's TESS Mission Hopes to Find Exoplanets Beyond Our Solar System (News Release - April 13)

The worlds orbiting other stars are called “exoplanets,” and they come in a wide variety of sizes, from gas giants larger than Jupiter to small, rocky planets about as big around as Earth or Mars. This artist’s impression shows an exoplanet orbiting the Sun-like star HD 85512 in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail).

This rocky super-Earth is an illustration of the type of planets future telescopes, like NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and James Webb, hope to find outside our solar system. TESS, slated to launch on April 16, 2018, is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun to search for transiting exoplanets.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA / Frankie Martin


NASA / Kim Shiflett


NASA / Kim Shiflett


NASA / Kim Shiflett


NASA / Kim Shiflett

A Major Developmental Milestone Has Been Achieved for the Joint Strike Fighter...

Lockheed Martin

F-35 Completes Most Comprehensive Flight Test Program in Aviation History (Press Release - April 12)

Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md. -- The F-35 program has accomplished the final developmental test flight of the System Development and Demonstration (SDD) phase of the program.

"Completing F-35 SDD flight test is the culmination of years of hard work and dedication from the joint government and industry team," said Vice Adm. Mat Winter, F-35 Program Executive Officer. "Since the first flight of AA-1 in 2006, the developmental flight test program has operated for more than 11 years mishap-free, conducting more than 9,200 sorties, accumulating over 17,000 flight hours, and executing more than 65,000 test points to verify the design, durability, software, sensors, weapons capability and performance for all three F-35 variants. Congratulations to our F-35 Test Team and the broader F-35 Enterprise for delivering this new powerful and decisive capability to the warfighter."

The final SDD flight occurred April 11 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland., when Navy test aircraft CF-2 completed a mission to collect loads data while carrying external 2,000-pound GBU-31 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and AIM-9X Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles.

From flight sciences to mission systems testing, the critical work completed by F-35 test teams cleared the way for the Block 3F capability to be delivered to the operational warfighter. More than 1,000 SDD flight test engineers, maintainers, pilots and support personnel took the three variants of the F-35 to their full flight envelope to test aircraft performance and flying qualities. The test team conducted six at-sea detachments and performed more than 1,500 vertical landing tests on the F-35B variant. The developmental flight test team completed 183 Weapon Separation Tests; 46 Weapons Delivery Accuracy tests; 33 Mission Effectiveness tests, which included numerous multi-ship missions of up to eight F-35s against advanced threats.

"The F-35 flight test program represents the most comprehensive, rigorous and the safest developmental flight test program in aviation history," said Greg Ulmer, Lockheed Martin's vice president and general manager of the F-35 program. "The joint government and industry team demonstrated exceptional collaboration and expertise, and the results have given the men and women who fly the F-35 great confidence in its transformational capability."

Developmental flight test is a key component of the F-35 program's SDD phase, which will formally be completed following an Operational Test and Evaluation and a Department of Defense decision to go into full-rate aircraft production.

While SDD required flight test is now complete, F-35 flight testing continues in support of phased capability improvements and modernization of the F-35 air system. This effort is part of the Joint Program Office's Continuous Capability Development and Delivery (C2D2) framework, which will provide timely, affordable incremental warfighting capability improvements to maintain joint air dominance against evolving threats to the United States and its allies.

With stealth technology, advanced sensors, weapons capacity and range, the F-35 is the most lethal, survivable and connected fighter aircraft ever built. More than a fighter jet, the F-35's ability to collect, analyze and share data is a powerful force multiplier that enhances all airborne, surface and ground-based assets in the battlespace and enables men and women in uniform to execute their mission and return home safe.

Source: Lockheed Martin

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Lockheed Martin

Photos of the Day: Bidding Adieu to Miami...

Just thought I'd share these pics that I took when I departed from Miami on an 11-day cruise to Central America one month ago today. These images were taken with my Nikon D3300 DSLR camera as the Norwegian Jade—the passenger ship I sailed on for this voyage—made her way from the Port of Miami's cruise terminal to the open sea on March 12. Needless to say, Miami is one great-looking city! Of course, when I go back to Florida (either late next year or in early 2020 to hopefully see NASA's Space Launch System out on its pad at Kennedy Space Center, prepping for its maiden flight on Exploration Mission-1), knock on wood, it will once again be Orlando (the city I flew to from Los Angeles when I last visited Cape Canaveral in early 2009) that I venture to in the Sunshine State to begin my trip. Again, knock on wood... Anyways, that's all I have to say for now. Happy Thursday!

LINK: Additional photos I took on my cruise to Central America