In the meantime on the ISS (and back on Earth)

Chris Hadfield arrived home from the International Space Station with his two colleagues, Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko, in mid-May. Two weeks later a new team took off to the station, and so Expedition 36 (the 36th long-duration mission aboard the ISS) is now on with full crew.

 --   credit: NASA

Friday night eyecandy

Friday night, time to switch off.

   --   via IMSO

Mileage in extraterrestrial vehicles - Moon and Mars distances

I recently run into a cool infographic showing distances driven by vehicles on the surface of the Moon and Mars, and a great time-lapse of the martian rover Curiosity - its 9 month squeezed into a minute.
That’s all dandy, but one has to get to the Moon and Mars before being able to enjoy some offroading. How far are they? The answer is not one number.
In this post: distances to ponder.

Earth, Mars and Moon to scale   --   source: ESA

Earthy Cake

It really is a cake - fantastic!

Friday night eyecandy

If you had a stressful week and just heard about the Virgin Galactic space flight with Leonardo DiCaprio -  you know, the one that sold for 1.5 million dollars in Cannes yesterday - than you are probably ready to take a deep breath and jump into a restful weekend.
Here are some relaxing images and videos to start you off: a gallery of chicks in a cockpit, a very pretty bling-bling time-lapse, and an award winning animated short film.
Happy weekend!

Flying Pancake

I made pancakes the other day and it reminded me ..

 

The strange-looking Vought V-173, nicknamed Flying Pancake, was a proof-of-concept aircraft from the U.S. dating back to World War II. The plane was designed by Charles H. Zimmerman, who in his patent wrote that an object of this invention was "to provide an aircraft capable of high speed in normal flight, of ascending and descending vertically, and of hovering without substantial horizontal motion."

Best of Chris Hadfield

Chris Hadfield, Canadian astronaut is back home by now from the International Space Station. He arrived to the ISS in December, and in mid-March he became the commander of Expedition 35.

Safely home - back on Earth, happily readapting to the heavy pull of gravity. Wonderful to smell and feel Spring.
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) May 14, 2013

--   image by Sean Rhodes

He has been tweeting from space, sending back incredible pictures, and has recorded fantastic videos showing us how life is on the ISS, bringing space a little closer to all of us.

In one of the last videos he recorded aboard the station he said "this experience is not individual, it is shared, it is mutual, and it is worldwide". He definitely made it just exactly that.

Here are my favorite images by and of Chris Hadfiled aboard the ISS - not in any particular order, plus the first music video from space!