The Ulysses is a space probe designed to study the Sun that was launched in 1990 on board space shuttle Atlantis. For 18 years this probe has travelled alone, battled through temperatures of 130 degrees below and fought off titanic gravitational forces. It’s main goal was to study the solar winds that eminate from the sun and the bubble (heliosphere) in space that is carved by them.

Now however Ulysses is dying, despite its heroic journey a fault with the power generator has meant that the hydrazine (Ulysses blood) is cooling and will soon freeze in it’s pipelines. The probe is expected to die within weeks even though all experiments have been shut down to save power.

The probe in it’s 18 year mission has orbited the sun 3 times and performed 6 polar passes. Each orbit takes six year and within that orbit the probe travelled as far out as 950 million km from the earth. As a result this incredible little device has flown more that 8.6billion km.

It’s legacy will live on for many years however, about 200 scientists have worked on Ulysses and some 1,500 peer reviewed papers have been published using data it has gathered.

Thank you Ulysses for all your hard work, you namesake would be proud

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There has not been much in the way of news coming from any of the mainstream space programs recently.  The next mission that was supposed to launch was STS125 which is the fifth and final mission to service the Hubble Telescope.

*The mission will be flown by Space Shuttle Atlantis, with another shuttle ready to launch in case a rescue mission is needed. STS-125 is currently scheduled to launch no earlier than February 17, 2009 following an anomaly aboard the telescope that occurred on September 27, 2008.

Atlantis will carry two new instruments to the HST, a replacement Fine Guidance Sensor, and six new gyroscopes and batteries to allow the telescope to continue to function at least through 2013. The crew will also install a new thermal blanket layer to provide improved insulation, and a "soft-capture mechanism" to aid in the safe de-orbiting of the spacecraft by an unmanned spacecraft at the end of its operational lifespan.

The thirtieth flight of shuttle Atlantis is also the first shuttle mission not related to the International Space Station since STS107 which ended in the Columbia disaster.

Due to the difference between the orbit of the International Space Station, and that of the Hubble Telescope, Atlantis will be unable to reach the ISS in the event of its heat shield becoming damaged upon launch. Therefore the mission will require another shuttle to be ready on launch pad 39B for immediate flight on the STS-401 Launch On Need (LON) rescue mission throughout Atlantis’ mission.

Check out my next post for some more space related news!

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* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-125

Further to my post yesterday the DOW just closed 678.19 down on it’s opening number leaving it at a 5 year all time low. If it does that again we may well see 8000 by tomorrow and that is a scary thought.

Also

The US national debt clock in New York City ran out of physical space the other day when the US debt topped $10 trillion. President Bush said, "That means we’ll never owe more than that, right?" – we can only dream

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I am not going to pretend I know that much about the economy and the way it works, if I did I would not be an IT geek I would be an economist!! I do know however that it is in a bit of a sorry state. The UK markets again closed down 5% and the US market closed down really 2%. This trend has continued for a while now and many billions of pounds or dollars (it doesn’t really matter which way you look at it) have been wiped from companies everywhere.

Banks in recent days have made attempts to stabalise the faltering markets but to little avail. Both UK and US governments have issued “rescue plans” to bail out banks who have run low on money thanks to dishing out too many risky loans. How much this helps may never be known but it is only going to ease this problem. My view, it’s only just started, 2009 looks to be a hard year financially. As I said I am no economic expert and I hope that I am totally wrong, but I can read, and everything I do read says hold on tight because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

There is not much else to say about this, I guess “Good Luck” is appropriate as I think we all need a bit right now.

My main source for all things financial is http://finance.google.com that’s where I suggest monitoring this issue.

Had to get something geeky into the post.

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Apologies for not writing for the past 2 weeks, things have been a bit weird round here and as a result I’ve not written anything.

Normal service to be resumed tomorrow!

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