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HoloLens wins rave review from astronaut

Image: Scott Kelly
Astronaut Scott Kelly wears a HoloLens headset on the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

After his return from nearly a year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly gave Microsoft’s HoloLens headset a big thumbs-up for work on the International Space Station – and for shooting down aliens in his spare time.

“It worked great,” he said today during a news briefing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. “I was really surprised. We messed around with it for about two hours, and immediately I sensed this is a capability we could use right now.”

The orbital test was part of Project Sidekick, a Microsoft-NASA collaboration to see how augmented-reality tools like HoloLens could facilitate operations on the space station. The HoloLens glasses can superimpose computer-generated graphics on the wearer’s field of view, and show someone else what the wearer is looking at. Both functions were put to the test in orbit.

“It had some cameras on it, and we could also see a display that’s in your field of view, The person on the ground could be drawing things in your field of view, and pointing to things, and I could be doing the same thing,” Kelly explained.

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Scott Kelly returns to Earth after year in space

Image: Scott Kelly
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly flashes thumbs-up signs after his return to Earth. (Credit: NASA)

Capping off a year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly breathed earthly air for the first time in 340 days today after a successful, safe trip from the International Space Station to the steppes of Kazakhstan.

Since last March’s blastoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the 52-year-old Kelly circled the planet more than 5,440 times, saw more than 10,800 orbital sunrises and sunsets, and put almost 144 million miles on his cosmic odometer.

The mission set a U.S. record for continuous spaceflight and blazed a trail for much longer trips to Mars and back. But to get a true sense of how long Kelly has been in space, consider this: The last time he was on Earth, Jeb Bush was the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

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Pluto’s polar canyons get their close-up

Image: Pluto north polar region
This enhanced-color image was obtained by New Horizons’ MVIC camera about 45 minutes before closest approach on July 14, 2015, when the spacecraft was 21,100 miles away. The lower edge of the image measures about 750 miles long. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

The heart-shaped region along Pluto’s equator has been the darling of NASA’s New Horizons mission, but it’s the north polar region that gets the love in this week’s featured image.

The area seen here is part of a region informally known as Lowell Regio. That’s a tribute to Percival Lowell, the millionaire astronomer who sparked the search that eventually led to Pluto’s discovery.

Toward the left side of the image, there’s a canyon that measures about 45 miles wide. Other canyons, to the east and west, are about 6 miles wide. These formations hint at tectonic activity in ancient times, according to the New Horizons science team.

Near the lower right corner, there are irregularly shaped pits that span as much as 45 miles. The science team says those pits are about 2.5 miles deep, and may indicate locations where subsurface ice has been lost from below. That would have caused the surface layer to collapse into the void.

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Scott Kelly: I could do another year in space

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NASA astronaut Scott Kelly answers questions from the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is getting ready to come home after spending a longer stretch in orbit than any other American in history, but he says he could stay in space for double that time.

“I could go another 100 days. I could go another year if I had to. It would just depend on what I was doing and if it made sense, although I do look forward to getting home here next week,” he told journalists today during a space-to-ground news conference.

The next few days will cap off a 340-day tour of duty on the International Space Station, which is aimed at studying how long-duration spaceflight could affect astronauts during even longer trips to Mars and back.

Kelly and his fellow year-in-spacer, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, are due to come back to Earth in a Soyuz capsule along with Russian crewmate Sergey Volkov on March 1.

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Astronaut goes ape on the space station

Image: Gorilla in space
NASA’s Scott Kelly floats through the International Space Station in a gorilla suit. (Credit: NASA)

Leave it to Scott Kelly, NASA’s record-holder for longest continuous time spent in space, to go big and go home: While winding down nearly a year in orbit, he donned an ape suit to terrorize a crewmate on the International Space Station.

At least British astronaut Tim Peake looks terrorized: It’s hard to believe he wasn’t in on the joke.

The prank started with the arrival of the gorilla suit – a gag gift from Kelly’s twin brother, Mark, that was sent up on a resupply flight. Scott Kelly climbed into the suit, and then climbed into a soft-sided storage container. NASA video shows Peake strapping down the container in the station’s Destiny lab as commentator Rob Navias narrates the scene.

The next shot shows the suit-wearing Kelly climbing out of the storage container, floating into the module next door, then chasing Peake in zero-G like a batty ape out of hell. Hilarity ensues.

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Astronaut applicants face 2,000-to-1 odds

Image: Scott Kelly
NASA’s Scott Kelly snaps a selfie during a spacewalk at the space station. (Credit: NASA)

You think it’s hard to get into Harvard? Try making an impression when you’re among the record-high group of 18,300 people who applied to be an astronaut.

NASA says that tally is three times as high as the number who applied the last time the space agency put out the call, for the Class of 2013. And it far exceeds the previous record of 8,000 applications, set in 1978 during the buildup to the space shuttle program.

Now that the application deadline has passed, NASA’s Astronaut Selection Board will have to winnow through the pile. The space agency expects to choose somewhere between eight and 14 astronaut candidates for the Class of 2017. That means the acceptance rate will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.05 percent, compared to a 6 percent rate for Harvard.

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Did Pluto’s moon Charon once have an ocean?

Image: Charon
This close-up of Charon’s canyons was taken by NASA’s New Horizons probe during last July’s flyby. The color-coded picture shows elevation data. Serenity Chasma’s depth can exceed 4 miles in places. In comparison, the Grand Canyon’s maximum depth is a mile. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Scientists say the patterns of ice in canyons on Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, look as if some the frozen water was once liquid. And that suggests Charon had a subsurface ocean in ancient times.

The evidence comes from close analysis of images and elevation data collected last July when NASA’s New Horizons probe zoomed past Pluto and its moons. Even before the flyby, scientists speculated that Charon may have harbored liquid water, and that some water may still flow beneath its icy surface. The stereo measurements from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LORRI, are consistent with that hypothesis.

The clues come in the form of stretch marks in the ice around Serenity Chasma, a canyon that’s 4.5 miles deep in some places.

“Charon’s tectonic landscape shows that, somehow, the moon expanded in its past, and – like Bruce Banner tearing his shirt as he becomes the Incredible Hulk – Charon’s surface fractured as it stretched,” the science team said in an image advisory on Thursday.

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Scientists dissect Pluto’s heart

Image: Pluto map
This map of the left side of Pluto’s heart-shaped feature uses colors to represent Pluto’s varied terrains, which helps scientists understand the geological processes at work. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the scientists behind NASA’s New Horizons mission are sharing a map that brings a different perspective to Pluto’s heart.

The map shows clearly that the dwarf planet’s bright heart-shaped region, informally known as Tombaugh Regio, can be broken into two geologically distinct areas.

The left side is dominated by an icy plain of frozen nitrogen, called Sputnik Planum. This is the part of the heart that’s dissected in the New Horizons team’s color-coded chart.

The map covers an area that measures 1,290 miles from top to bottom, which is roughly the width of the United States from north to south.

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Apollo 14 moonwalker Edgar Mitchell dies at 85

Image: Edgar Mitchell
Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell sits for his official portrait in 1970. Mitchell’s crewmates on the mission in 1971 were Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa. (Credit: NASA)

Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell has died at the age of 85 after a months-long illness, according to reports that emerged on the 45th anniversary of his first moonwalk.

Members of Mitchell’s family spread the word on Feb. 5 in obituaries published by news outlets in Palm Beach, Fla., where the former astronaut lived. The Palm Beach Post quoted his daughter, Kimberly Mitchell, as saying he died at a local hospice at about 10 p.m. ET the previous night.

“As a member of the Apollo 14 crew, Edgar is one of only 12 men to walk on the moon, and he helped to change how we view our place in the universe,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.

Edgar Mitchell took part in the first lunar mission to follow 1970’s nearly disastrous flight of Apollo 13, and became the sixth human to set foot on the moon.

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Pluto probe spots ice islands in a nitrogen sea

Image: Pluto's icy hills
This image focuses in on a part of Pluto’s heart-shaped region where hills of water ice appear to be floating on top of a nitrogen glacier. Challenger Colles, toward the top of the inset photo, is a wide cluster of water-ice hills. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

There’s plenty of evidence that Pluto is a frozen water world, with mountains of ice that rise more than 10,000 feet in height, but here’s something even weirder: Huge chunks of frozen H2O appear to be floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen, like icebergs in Earth’s polar regions.

Those are among the findings reported on Feb. 4 in this week’s update from NASA’s New Horizons mission. The piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft collected gigabytes’ worth of observations last year during its July 14 flyby, and it’s been sending back data ever since then.

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