Space Shuttle Endeavour to Head to California

Endeavour shown here atop a modified Boeing 747 in
anticipation of its upcoming ferry flight.

Endeavour – the last NASA shuttle ever constructed – is slated to journey to a new home this week, as it prepares to leave Kennedy Space Center aboard a modified Boeing 747 and head toward Los Angeles, California.

After a series of delays due to anticipated thunderstorms along Endeavour’s route, the scheduled ferry flight has been pushed back to a Wednesday morning sunrise takeoff.

NASA officials say they are currently discussing how the delays will affect Endeavour’s flight plan, which was originally slated to include a stop in Houston ahead of a Thursday arrival in L.A. The space shuttle is now expected to arrive on Friday.

Built to replace Challenger after the tragic loss of the shuttle in 1986, Endeavour made a total of 25 missions before its retirement in the spring of last year. During those missions, the shuttle covered 122,883,151 miles, spent 299 days in orbit and accomplished a number of major milestones, including the delivery of the first American-made component to the International Space Station and the flight of the first African-American female astronaut into space.

Clear to land: NASA new 'augmented reality' goggles will let airline pilots 'see' through fog

Prototype: The glasses, now being offered commercially, track the
user's eye-movements to overlay information

NASA has created augmented reality goggles which could soon be available to airline pilots and help them 'see' through fog.

The goggles can track a pilot's head-movements and overlay runways, towers and potentially other airplanes over their view - an invaluable tool when fog rolls down across an airport.

Even as the pilot turns his head, the goggles can react in real-time to ensure the virtual representations always stay in the same place as their real-world counterparts.

Trey Arthur, an electronics engineer at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia, told InnovationNewsDaily: 'If pilots are not familiar with the airport, they have to stop and pull out maps.

NASA Offers Reward For Green Propellant

NASA’s Technology Demonstration Missions Program is looking for “green” alternatives to toxic hydrazine as a storable propellant for spacecraft, offering contracts worth as much as $50 million each to researchers with promising ideas.

The agency is seeking proposals for demonstrations of systems that use storable monopropellants or bipropellants that are safer than hydrazine to generate spacecraft propulsion and power. The broad area announcement, which is available at http://go.usa.gov/Qbx, calls for complete integrated systems that include engines, tanks, valves, injectors, igniters, thrust chambers and propellant-control systems.