China Succeeds With It's First Manned Docking

Going through the IO9 blog articles I was blown away to discover that China has an orbiting space lab called Tiangong-1. Not afraid to admit I dropped the ball on this one! But I degress, China in the early hours of June 18th 2012 succeeded in docking with Tiangong-1. This makes it one of only three countries behind the USA and Russia. The three person crew consisted of taikonauts Jing Heipeng, Liu Wang and Liu Yang, China's first woman in space.

China is aiming towards a space station in 2020, which may not be too ambitious for their program considering that this was only their fourth manned mission.

Space.com article here

Mysteries of Moon Dust...Finally Solved?

Kallamis sent in an interesting note that I found facinating reading, so appologies K. I think others might enjoy the article as well.



From 69 - 72 our astronauts were bringing home cool things from the moon for study. But even before this, they noticed after landing how strange the dust acted on the moon. It seemed to hang too long above the surface after being disturbed, it got into everything and stuck there like it was sticking to tape, and was filled with super fine green and orange glass beads formed from the super heating and cooling following impacts.

Houston discovered that the dust was unusually chemically reactive for what is essentially a hunk of rock. They also found that it was lousy at conducting heat. So bad that the surface on the sun side could be at the boiling water level, and only a few feet below be far below freezing.

Thanks to new technology Geologist Marek Zbik of Queensland university may have figured out what gives the moon dust it's so called pixie dust like qualities. And now it gets good again. He wanted to look closely at the glass beads. These should have been filled with gas or vapor as any other bubble is.

"Instead of gas or vapor," says Zbik, "the lunar bubbles were filled with a highly porous network of alien-looking glassy particles that span the bubbles' interior."
Since nano particles can become statically charged, that would also explain the clinging effect of the dust.

Really interesting reading article.

Now I say we need to go back, and do some drilling. Lets just see what else we don't know yet.

Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2117143,00.html#ixzz1yGpGgNpc

Also check out the WIKI article on Luna regolith and collection here  (editor)