News

This week in space for Canada is all about celebrating the final return of the last Canadian scheduled to go into space for at least the next five years, contemplating what the future might hold and maybe, just maybe making plans to help mold that future into something useful.

Canadian Space Agency Flight Engineer Robert Thirsk, Expedition 21 Flight Engineer and Soyuz Commander Roman Romanenko and European Space Agency Flight Engineer Frank De Winne undocked their Soyuz spacecraft from the station at 10:56 p.m. EST Monday and landed in Kazakhstan at 2:15 a.m. Tuesday, 1:15 p.m. local Kazakhstan time. The Soyuz spacecraft landed upright which helped the search and recovery teams extract the astronauts.

This week in space for Canada is all about trial balloons released from the Canadian Forces (CF) and a variety of civilian experts regarding Canadian capabilities to monitor, protect and defend our arctic sovereignty at the recently concluded Canadian Space Summit, held this past weekend at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario.

Next Tuesday Robert Thirsk will return to Earth on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft ending his six month stay on the International Space Station as a member of Expedition 21. In his last week in space he will be very busy with ongoing experiments but will no doubt have time to reflect on the past six months and among those thoughts will be the realization that …

Space journalist Elizabeth Howell was among the 100 attendees at the first NASA launch tweetup at the Kennedy Space Center, Nov. 16, 2009. With a golden flash, space shuttle Atlantis punched through the first cloud hanging between the pad and her destination in Earth orbit.

This week in space for Canada is all about building the next generation of space leaders, allowing them the chance to meet interesting people and providing the potential for learning, incentives and prizes. First off, it’s important to note that the 2009 Canadian Space Summit begins this Friday, November 20th and continues on until Sunday afternoon, November 22nd at the Royal Military College in Kingston, …

NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis lifted-off today at 2:28 p.m. ET on an 11-day mission to service the the International Space Station (ISS). On-board the shuttle is the Canadian APEX-Cambium (Advanced Plant EXperiments on Orbit) experiment. The experiment will help determine the role gravity plays in trees forming different kinds of wood.

It would seem Guy Lalibert really got good value for the $35 million he spent on his flight in October to the International Space Station. According to Influence Communication of Montreal who were authorized by Lalibert to assess the value of the media coverage, the total advertising value of Lalibert’s media coverage between June 4 and October 14, 2009 was CAN$592 million.

NASA today announced that they have confirmed the presence of water on the moon by its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS). The LCROSS spacecraft and its companion rocket stage made twin impacts in the Cabeus crater Oct. 9 that created a plume of material from the bottom of a crater that has not seen sunlight in billions of years. This is good news …