Hello Troops,
I believe tonight's Troubadour will offer you plenty in which to sink your teeth. I'm preparing a special Troubadour post tomorrow with new photos of the nearly finished Odyssey II simulator at the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center.

Now, be good and read on. It's time to learn something constructive.

Mr. W.

Discovery Space Center Hires New Assistant Director

Jon Parker, Discovery Space Center's new Assistant Director, flight directing a Columbia mission.
This picture was taken just before he transmutified to the CMSEC where he was simultaneously flight directing a Phoenix mission.

Many of us know Jon Parker, flight director extraordinaire. We know he has remarkable powers, like his ability to direct two mission at the same time from two different location (don't know how he does it, but some speculate he carries a time / space portal in his back pocket) Well, this mild mannered and modestly humble long time Space Center volunteer and employee has accepted a new position as assistant director at the Discovery Space Center.

Congratulations Jon from all of us at The Troubadour. May all your missions be successful and may all your crews shower you in tears of gratitude.

Mr. W.

Space and Science News

Death from the Sky: How Our Solar System will Die

From Quarks to Quasars

Just as the life on Earth is dependent upon the energy from the sun for sustenance, so too does the fate of our solar system hinge on the sun’s survival. Our sun, which is classified as a yellow dwarf (a misnomer since the sun is neither small, nor yellow), is a middle age star that’s approximately 5 billion years old. As a main-sequence star with a finite lifespan, it will eventually die. This end will occur following the depletion of the last of the hydrogen forged in its core. As this happens, the core of the sun will shrink under its own gravity and become so dense that the helium atoms will begin to collide to form carbon and oxygen atoms. The collisions of said elements will churn out more energy than the current amount that is produced by the sun’s fusion of hydrogen into helium (which in turn, provides nourishment to Earth and all of the neighboring planets in our solar system) Read More

More from Quarks to Quasars

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a brilliant example showing just how important NASA is to the world.
The Pirate Party of Russia has offered NASA the use of its dedicated servers to temporarily host the US space agency’s website as it has been shut down “due to the lapse in federal government funding.” NASA was supposed to be marking its 55th birthday this week, but the US space agency gave furlough notices, not birthday invitations, to nearly all of its 18,000 employees, and began fretting about future missions as funding dried up with the US government shutdown.
“We would like to offer you bulletproof collocation or dedicated servers on our hosting platform till the end of the crisis,” the Pirate Party said in a statement posted on its website Thursday.... Read More

An Actual Clip from the Upcoming Movie Ender's Game

Troops,
I'm really looking forward to this movie.
"Because we already have the uniforms." Sounds so Space Center to me!!

Professor Michio Kaku Shares a Disturbing Vision of the Future

The Dark Side of Technology

An Interactive Portal to Mars

From Science Gymnasium

Use your cell, tablet, or laptop as an interactive portal to Mars. As you move your screen, the view seamlessly moves along the Martian landscape with you! You can zoom in and out to examine things close-up or just lie in the dirt and look up at the sky.
Interactive portal: http://www.360cities.net/image/mars-panorama-curiosity-solar-day-177#-71.66,-77.96,85.0

PS- It's waaaay cooler on your cell or tablet!

Mars Panorama - Curiosity rover: Martian solar day 177 in out-of-this-world

UW engineers invent programming language to build synthetic DNA

"Similar to using Python or Java to write code for a computer, chemists soon could be able to use a structured set of instructions to “program” how DNA molecules interact in a test tube or cell.

A team led by the University of Washington has developed a programming language for chemistry that it hopes will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide cars, robots and other devices. In medicine, such networks could serve as “smart” drug deliverers or disease detectors at the cellular level." Read More

The Imaginarium

The ordinary transposed to extraordinary