NASA.gov, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s public-facing website has had a full makeover.
The new design is very “Web 2.0″ with (smoothly!) moving widgets and easy access to multimedia such as NASA’s picture of the day and NASA TV. The front page does convey a certain feeling of the site ‘dumbing down’ or at least trying to appeal to the widest audience possible, even giving fairly major prominence to the kids section and accessibility for the public at large is very important but what we really don’t want is the science itself dumbing down and this appears not to be the case (yet!).
In other NASA news, the ISS crew has been chasing a minor atmosphere leak which is suspected to be around the new Harmony module’s mating vestibule. I was somewhat irritated to find a story on slashdot with the poster asking: “While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end?” which makes me feel like screaming “It’s not like a trip to the shops you know!” but people like this rarely, if ever, comprehend. There is nothing trivial, tried, tested or particularly safe about space exploration in general and the ISS is no exception. Travelling around the globe 200 miles up and 17,500mph in a vacuum is never going to be easy but like someone once said, we choose to do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard..”
Space Shuttle flight STS-122 is scheduled for launch on Thursday 6th December at 21:31:44ZULU and will see Atlantis carrying the European Columbus module to the International Space Station. Let’s hope Columbus’ mating structure seals properly!
Don’t forget, you can watch the launch live over the web on NASA.TV as usual.
Tags: atlantis, columbus, iss, nasa, web 2.0
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