• 9th May 2007 - By chrislintott

    There’s something really wonderful about the photo below, taken while the Queen talked to those aboard the International Space Station as part of her visit to NASA.

    queeniss.jpg
  • 2 Comments to “Colliding worlds”

    • Paul on May 16, 2007

      Except that the Queen didn’t actually talk to them at all, which surprised me. She left all the conversation from her end to Mike Foale!

      Paul

    • [...] The main point of our visit to the Goddard Space Centre a day or two ago was to catch up with the team behind the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is now less than a year from launch. Obviously we were following some more prestigious British visitors, but they were extremely nice to us anyway. It’s a shock to realise that the Apollo era data just isn’t good enough to plan for a manned return to the Moon, and so LRO’s task is to create the ultimate lunar map from an orbit just 50km above the lunar surface. The impact of these pictures should be spectacular; they’ll show such fine detail that we should be able to see the tracks left by the lunar rovers the Apollo astronauts used. The spacecraft parts are being assembled at Goddard now, and we were allowed to get up close and personal with the spacecraft bus (the chassis, essentially). I’m now paranoid my jinx will strike, but they do seem to know what they’re doing… [...]

    Leave a Reply