Congress has a proposal on the table that could extend the life of the Shuttle by one year. It may come up for a final vote next week. So far it is all hot air as they haven't put any money where their mouth is.
NASA hasn't gotten the replacement for the Shuttle built yet and already they are cutting corners. Space.com is reporting that they plan not to build the six-person capsule that was to transport crews up to ISS and will now concentrate only on the four-person capsule to be used in the next Moon landings. The article says that NASA will rely on Russia and Europe and Japan who have not flown to the station yet and commercial carriers who have not even test-flown their craft yet (not that NASA has test flown the CEV either) to ferry crews to ISS until the six-person capsule is eventually built sometime after the four-person capsule is completed.
And although they haven't launched the first test rocket for the capsule yet they are already talking about either cancelling the second test launch or combining it with a capsule test. When I was working on computers they always said to make one change at a time so if something went wrong you would know where to look for it. I would think the same would apply to rocket science.
Sunspots Observed
I was not able to do any solar observing this month. There hasn't been anything much to observe again this month anyway.
Observing Hours for the Year 2009
| Day | Night | Total | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hours | Days | Avg | Hours | Days | Avg | Hours | Days | Avg | |
| Jan | 0.50 | 2 | 0.25 | 0.25 | 1 | 0.25 | 0.75 | 2 | 0.38 |
| Feb | 2.75 | 11 | 0.25 | 2.50 | 9 | 0.28 | 2.25 | 14 | 0.38 |
| Mar | 0.00 | 0 | 0.0 | 4.00 | 7 | 0.57 | 4.00 | 7 | 0.57 |
| Apr | 0.25 | 1 | 0.25 | 0.75 | 2 | 0.38 | 1.00 | 2 | 0.50 |
| TOTAL | 3.50 | 14 | 0.25 | 7.50 | 19 | 0.39 | 11.00 | 25 | 0.44 |
