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Richard Garriott’s father, Owen Garriott, W5LFL made history as the first ham radio operator to communicate with radio amateurs from space on the STS-9 Space Shuttle mission almost twenty-five years ago. Richard is the programmer/developer of the Ultima series of computer games.

Through multiple agreements with NASA, the Russian Space Agency, RSC Energia, Space Adventures Ltd, and ARISS (Amateur Radio on the International Space Station), Richard Garriott will fly to ISS and will communicate with students, ham radio operators, friends, and family world-wide using the ARISS amateur radio station on-board the ISS.

Richard Garriott, with the amateur radio callsign, W5KWQ is the sixth private citizen to be flown by the Russian space agency to the ISS.  A legendary video game programmer and designer, Garriott will be traveling to orbit this October and will speak with hundreds of students while thousands more listen in during a series of ten-minute ham radio contacts.  His on-orbit stay on Soyuz and ISS is planned for October 12 – 22, 2008.

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I recently ran across Spaceweather PHONE, an interesting service to those who have a strong interest in space, or radio wave propagation. It is provided by the Web site Spaceweather.com, itself an excellent source of current information about what is happening in space.

Spaceweather PHONE is an astronomy alert service from the creators of Spaceweather.com. Sign up for our service — for yourself or as a gift for someone else — and we’ll phone you when things are happening in the sky. When auroras appear over your hometown, your phone will ring. When the space station is about to fly over your back yard, your phone will ring. When planets align … you get the idea. The voice you hear will be Dr. Tony Phillips telling you what to look for and when. Each phone call comes with a simultaneous email message, so if you miss part of your call or can’t remember the details — just check your email for the full story!

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Amateur Radio is where you find it. In this case, it was about 20 miles straight up as these engineering students used GPS and Amateur Radio to keep track of a new record-setting balloon.

Early-career engineers at Lockheed Martin who are also earning engineering degrees at Cornell broke the world amateur high-altitude balloon record in a recent near-space flight that exceeded 125,000 feet.

The 19 graduate students are part of Lockheed Martin’s Engineering Leadership Development Program. The balloon launch was the capstone effort of Project Blue Horizon (PBH), an educational component of the three-year program. The students are employed at Lockheed Martin Systems Integration in Owego, N.Y., while completing their systems engineering master’s degrees at Cornell. (Read more)

SOURCE: Science Daily

Marauding ants in Texas are raising IT havoc. This article tells of a non-indigenous species of ant that is heading straight for Houston, taking out computers, radios, vehicles and even a sewage treatment plant along its way. The bug situation is bad enough that the Johnson Space Center has had to call in the exterminators to keep the little critters out of their critical systems. (Read more)

An International Space Station Expedition 17 ARISS school contact has been planned with participants at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), Washington, DC, USA on 03 May. The event is scheduled to begin at approximately 16:10 UTC.

The contact will be a telebridge between stations NA1SS and NN1SS in Maryland. The contact should be audible over most of the Eastern USA. Interested parties are invited to listen in on the 145.80 MHz downlink. The participants are expected to conduct the conversation in English. Audio from the QSO is planned to be fed into the EchoLink *AMSAT* (101 377) and *JK1ZRW* (277 208) servers and the IRLP 9010 reflector during the contact. (Read more)

The US Navy’s first attempt to hit malfunctioning spy satellite USA 193 with a missile could come around 5:30 p.m. Hawaii time on Wednesday Feb. 20_th (0330 UT, Feb. 21_st) during the lunar eclipse. This is based on an air traffic advisory warning pilots to steer clear of a patch of Pacific Ocean near Hawaii just when USA 193 is due to pass overhead.

Until the satellite is shot down, it remains visible to casual sky watchers during evening passes over US and Canadian towns and cities; experienced observers say the decaying satellite is sometimes as bright as the stars of Orion, making it an easy target for unaided eyes and off-the-shelf digital cameras. Details, photos and more information are available at SpaceWeather.com.

SOURCE: SpaceWeather.com

An on-line source for predictions for your location without the need to download software is heavens-above.com.

On Wednesday night, February 20_th, the full Moon will turn a
delightful shade of red and possibly turquoise, too. It’s a total lunar eclipse—the last one until December 2010. Sky watchers in Europe, the Americas, parts of the Middle East and Africa are favored for good views of the two-hour event. Visit SpaceWeather.com for full coverage including maps and timetables, live webcasts and discussion.

SOURCE: SpaceWeather.com

Ready your telescopes! Tonight, Dec. 18th, Mars makes its closest approach to Earth until the year 2016. At a distance of only 55 million miles, Mars outshines every star in the night sky (it is slightly brighter than Sirius) and draws attention to itself with its distinctive red color. Plus, it looks great through a backyard telescope.

Ready to look? Train your optics on the bright red “star” rising in the east after sunset: sky map.

SOURCE: spaceweather.com