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I thought I'd call before he goes into quarantine ahead of his to the space station.

I had a long list of questions for the "Nasa Brit" but it wasn't long before I was on the end of an interrogation myself.

Piers wanted to know all about the and was pumping me for answers. He'd caught one of the leaders' debates on US TV and was fascinated to hear all about the "Clegg effect".

most famous export still takes a great interest in events "back home".

Piers will be part of the crew on Atlantis which will deliver the to the orbiting platform, as well as several tonnes of supplies.

The launch is currently set for Friday 14 May.

With only three shuttle flights left until retirement of the orbiter fleet, this mission is scheduled to mark the very last time we see in action. This fact is reflected in the STS-132 mission badge which depicts Atlantis flying into the sunset.

Memories and memorabilia will be a key part of this flight, says Piers:

"We're taking up a lot of stuff for people who've worked on Atlantis over the years. Some people down at the Kennedy Space Center have spent their entire careers working on her, so we're going to try to honour them. It'll be things like an Atlantis flag, but I don't want to say too much now because it will spoil it. You'll have to wait.
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"I flew on Atlantis in 2002 and we were in her last week for the launch rehearsal, and she still looks the same - the same little scuffs on the lockers and on the floor. An old friend, and entrusted friend."

It's always a case of "never say never". The Endeavour shuttle launch which I attended in February was an orbiter would lift off at night; and then the following mission of Discovery got delayed and it too ended up .

So, there is a circumstance in which Atlantis could yet make another flight. As you probably know, Nasa's flight rules now state that for every mission there must be another shuttle ready to "" if the first one has a problem and can't return its crew to Earth.

This emergency shuttle would go and fetch the astronauts from the space station and bring them home.

Even the very last shuttle mission will need such a standby, and Atlantis will fulfil that role. But there's been quite a bit of talk of Nasa just flying out this orbiter anyway with a reduced crew. If it's ready to go, why not? It would add considerably to the stores on the station. The hypothetical mission even has a name - .

As Piers says, though, "that's an on-going discussion, well above my paygrade", and he and his crew-mates will be flying on the assumption that when they bring Atlantis home the ship .

Piers is fulfilling a very different role on this mission to his two previous ones. Then, he was tasked with conducting spacewalks. On this flight, he will be on robotic arm duty.

The big item he'll have to move will be that Russian MRM. I got a chance recently to look over this module in the in Titusville close to the Kennedy Space Center. I climbed a very high, very wobbly platform to look over the module.

For someone who has become accustomed to the style of "silver tube" made in Europe for the ISS, seeing something which has very different lines comes as a fascinating shock.

The name "Mini Research Module" makes it sound as though the unit is some kind of laboratory. But in reality, it is more of a storeroom. The MRM will also serve as a new docking port for Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft.

The picture attached to this page was taken in Titusville by Clive Simpson, the editor of (Clive has a better camera than me!). You can't see it but tucked down one side of the module is a spare "elbow" for the which will go to the station in late 2011 or early 2012.

Piers is really looking forward to his new role. He's hoping all the work he'll have to do will be conducted from the new seven-windowed work station recently attached to the platform:

"You know we have the new Cupola installed on station, the big 'greenhouse'? We're hoping all the robotics will be operated from there. So I'll spend my days getting up in the morning, doing my teeth and then jumping into the robo-station. I'll be hanging upside-down, doing my work and watching the UK slide by.
Ìý
"There's time to do that and it's unbelievably good, I can tell you. It's like the best of every geography lesson you've ever had but pasted on to a sphere with clouds. You see Ireland and the UK all in one glance curved around the Earth. Just beautiful. You come up close and you can see all the cities and rivers. It's lovely; you could spend hours looking out the window."

Piers promises to come back to the UK several times this year. He's been following British space activity closely and has already had a briefing on the new :

"I think it's great. Industry called for this; the Royal Society called for this; and finally Parliament got the word. I'm hoping it will basically energise the political will there in the UK to funnel more effort behind space. There's an educated workforce there and it's just perfect. You could probably be doing twice as much as you are doing now."

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. It's from the Kennedy Space Center to place the famous observatory in orbit.

The telescope's achievements are immense. Few instruments in the history of science have had quite the same "wow factor"; and anyone who looks at its iconic pictures cannot fail to question - just a little bit - their place and significance in the grand scheme of things.

As we've come to expect on such occasions, Nasa has released a suitably stunning image to celebrate the birthday.

The , a colossal birthing cloud for new stars in our galaxy. The pillars of dust and gas which dominate the scene are about three light-years long. Amazing.

The version rendered on this page uses data acquired by Hubble's , which was installed on the last shuttle servicing mission and promises a raft of further discoveries as the telescope moves into its twilight years.

How appropriate that Hubble was launched on the "Discovery" shuttle. Its commander for that mission was , with whom I managed to exchange a few words this week.

The deployment mission sticks out in my mind because of the issue Loren and his crew encountered with one of the solar arrays.

These panels were supplied to Nasa as part of the 15% European contribution to Hubble and were manufactured in my home town, Bristol, at BAe.

So as you can imagine, there was much pride in that fact... but also a little consternation when the roll-out of one of the arrays didn't go quite as planned.

As Loren recalls, the problem had nothing to do with the arrays themselves, but rather an error in the software managing the unfurling process:

"It all came down to a sensor and a software routine. If the sensor sensed that there was too much tension being placed on the array when it was being unrolled then it would cut off the motors to try to prevent any damage to the solar array. It turned out the software routine was the culprit. It was getting triggered somehow and cutting off the motors when indeed there was no excess tension. Someone worked it out in the end, and a command was sent to the computer from the ground to bypass that part of the software; and then the solar array rolled out to its full extension.
Ìý
"But you know, we had Bruce McCandless and Kathy Sullivan suited up in the air-lock ready to go out and do the job manually. They were almost at vacuum in the air-lock and another five minutes they would have been outside. As a consequence, of course, they missed the release of the telescope because we did it almost immediately."

I promised I would occasionally dig around in the Ö÷²¥´óÐã archive for items of interest, and on this special occasion I've pulled up the former Ö÷²¥´óÐã science correspondent James Wilkinson's report on this solar array roll-out incident. James catches perfectly the drama of the moment.

The shuttle is inextricably linked to the story of Hubble. Without the shuttle, Hubble wouldn't have enjoyed the longevity it has; and there's no doubt the observatory has been one of the best advertisements for the reusable spaceplane's capabilities.

But both will soon become history. Hubble's last servicing mission should give it at least four years of further operational life. For shuttle, however, the end is even nearer, with the Discovery obiter itself due to make the last flight later this year.

Both space-borne astronomy and human space exploration are on the cusp of major change - although perhaps not on totally separate paths.

The great space observatories of the future will increasingly be sent a long distance from Earth, to the so-called - gravitational "sweetspots" in space where craft can hold station with relatively little effort.

The advantage of putting telescopes at these locations is that they enjoy very stable viewing conditions - none of the big swings in temperature and light endured by space telescopes positioned much closer to Earth, for example.

Indeed, in Hubble's early years, it had a job keeping still enough to take its snaps because those Bristol solar panels would wobble as they warmed and cooled (BAe Bristol made an improved set of arrays for the first shuttle servicing mission in 1993).

Europe's were recently despatched to the , which is 1.5 million km from our planet on its "night side".

will follow them in 2012; and then in 2014, Hubble's "successor" - the , a colossal machine about the size of a tennis court - will also make its way out to L2.

Just like Hubble, all these telescopes will experience wear and tear, and because they are not close to Earth and have not been designed for astronaut servicing - their missions are highly unlikely to last 20 years.

In the case of the far-infrared Herschel telescope, it's very probable that the observatory will go blind even before Hubble because its special detectors need to be cooled by liquid helium and this .

All this raises the interesting question: if you gave future L2 telescopes a plug-and-play design like Hubble so they too could be serviced, would you ever consider sending astronauts that far to do the job?

It's a question I put this week to , the astronaut they call "the Hubble repairman". John flew three Hubble servicing missions, including the fifth and final mission last year.

He broadly supports . One of its key features is the so-called "flexible path" idea, which envisages robots and humans going to ever more distant and challenging locations in space.

This might require special stations being set up in space where craft can re-fuel before moving off to their next destination.

John believes this sort of thinking could make L2 servicing missions achievable.

"The fuel depot concept, although I'm not very fond of it, it does require that you have a kind of servicing architecture, perhaps with space tugs that would allow you to go out to L2, robotically at first, and refuel the cryogens to cool the detectors, or fuel the spacecraft themselves to extend their lives.
Ìý
"With Hubble, that's been the huge enabler. The hundred or a thousand-factor increase in the return of exciting science has been the ability to upgrade and repair the telescope. So I think in the future, we will incorporate these features into new observatories but only if the space infrastructure allows it. [The Obama plan] is our opportunity as we redefine that infrastructure for low-Earth orbit and beyond."

If you haven't yet caught our Hubble 20th anniversary audio-slideshow with Professor Alec Boksenberg, you can find it . Alec is one of the UK's most distinguished astronomers, and was part of the team which designed the Hubble , one of the telescope's first instruments (parts also made in Bristol).

At the time of Hubble's launch I had a radio show in Cambridge, and Alec was a regular contributor to the programme. He would update us on the telescope's early performance and how Nasa proposed to deal with its flawed mirror.

We've also asked English Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, to pen a few thoughts on Hubble. You can read them . In addition, I've attached another item from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã archive - a radio feature produced by my former colleague David Whitehouse. Broadcast on the eve of the launch, the feature looks at what Hubble might achieve.

I think it's probably true to say the old telescope has exceeded everyone's expectations. Raise a glass.

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We're talking about the astronomical stuff of nightmares - gargantuan explosions that rip apart giant stars to create black holes.

These events are detected in space every few days thanks to .

The spacecraft sits above the Earth hunting for , the intensely bright but fleeting flashes of very high-energy radiation that can sweep our way from all points in the sky.

It's not just imploding stars that emit GRBs; colliding dead stars and black holes can also produce these high-energy "flashbulbs".

When Swift detects one, it swings itself to look directly into the burst with X-ray and ultraviolet/visible telescopes. It also sends out an alert asking other space and ground-based facilities to train their eyes on the event, to analyse the "afterglow" at many different wavelengths.

has been a tremendously successful endeavour that has just bagged its 500th GRB (an event that has been given the not-so-catchy designation GRB 100413B).

It's one of those missions in which the even though in cash terms its contribution has been relatively small.

Just as with two of Nasa's recent Sun missions - and the - Britain has provided key bits of kit for Swift.

The X-ray camera and elements of the ultraviolet/optical telescope come from these shores. Indeed, they included spare parts left over from Europe's X-ray space telescope, XMM. How British is that?

Data processing and archiving is also done here, with much of the effort led out of the University of Leicester.

So what have we learnt from Swift? Well, the mission has certainly put some observational flesh on the theoretical bones.

There have been many uncertainties and mysteries surrounding GRBs since their first detection in the 1960s (the Americans initially thought they might be coming from secret Soviet bomb tests!).

Scientists like to talk about "long bursts" and "short bursts".

Long ones - those that last more than a couple of seconds - we're pretty certain now come from end-stage stars collapsing in on themselves to form black holes. The implosion of these beasts produces superfast jets of material that punch their way out of the dying star into space. Dr Julian Osborne from Leicester takes up the story:

"The gamma-rays are generally thought to be due to what are called internal shocks. You have a jet of material coming out of the star and this jet is supposed to be somehow stuttering, and collisions within the jet in the various stutters are thought to be the cause of the gamma-ray pulses themselves. It's like the 'birth cries' of the black hole, if you like. It's then the collision of that jet with the surrounding medium [beyond the star] that is thought to generate the afterglow - the much longer lived, days to weeks, X-ray and optical emission."

Short GRBs - ones that last less than a couple of seconds - probably have a more varied genesis.

Some may come from compact, super-magnetic remnants of dead stars known as . It's hard to envisage these objects. Think of something about the mass of our Sun confined in a space about the size of London with a magnetic field quadrillions of times more powerful than the Earth. Bizarre.

Another key source is probably the merging of other dead-star remnants (). These are a key source for study now because their coalescence should be accompanied by the emission of gravitational waves.

have been built to try to detect these long-sought ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted by Einstein, and every time Swift clocks a GRB, it alerts the gravitational wave hunters so they can look through the squiggly lines in their data for any hint of a signal.

Scientists hope GRBs might lead them to detect gravitational waves

One of Swift's great achievements, though, has been in pushing back our understanding of the really deep Universe.

On 23 April last year, in the Constellation Leo.

This burst holds the record for being the most distant object yet seen in the Universe. Its flash covered a staggering 13.04 billion light-years to reach us.

If you consider the cosmos is about 13.7 billion years old, it means the star that produced GRB 090423 could have been among the very first to shine in the Universe. Julian says:

"The most distant objects known in the Universe are now gamma-ray bursts. It's these that really demonstrate the importance of GRBs for astronomy and cosmology, because they take us to an evolutionary phase in the Universe that we know very little about indeed. Identifying the most distant galaxies tells us about galaxy formation and the first generation of stars, perhaps. It's an era we struggle to see any other way."

Swift has a good few years left in it. It has no consumables onboard, no propellants or coolants that could run out. It runs the usual risks of course - its X-ray telescope has already been hit by a micrometeorite - but there's every reason to believe it can continue to function throughout most of this decade.

For the UK contribution too, there is optimism. Although UK Swift will get 20% less funding in future, it survived the recent cull in operational monies that support British involvement in several other high-profile missions: .

I blogged about this set-back for UK space science in February. However, I'm pleased to report that since that posting a possible solution has emerged which would see the European Space Agency pick up some of the UK costs of these missions. This should be confirmed in the coming months.

Watch this space.

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to sell his new human spaceflight policy, not to offer concessions.

Anyone hoping to hear in his speech at the Kennedy Space Center that he was going to extend the shuttle programme or breathe life back into the will have been disappointed.

The president stuck to the broad outline of the policy he announced in .

The previous administration's ideas to go back to the Moon are history; the shuttle fleet will be retired at the end of this year; and the private sector will be asked to loft astronauts to a life-extended space station.

What we did get that was new was some specifics - some targets, a timeline.

There was a commitment to start work on a big new rocket no later than 2015, to send astronauts on missions beyond low-Earth orbit in a little over 10 years from now (including to asteroids), and to try to circle Mars by the mid-2030s.

In Obama's words, you could even hear echoes of :

"Early in the next decade, a set of crewed flights will test and prove the systems required for exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. And by 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. So we'll start - we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it."

The only thing that hinted at a concession was the promise to pick up technologies developed for Constellation's Orion crewship, to produce a "lifeboat" for the International Space Station - an emergency escape vehicle, if you like, which astronauts could use to flee a catastrophic accident on the platform.

But in truth it was never likely that Orion's development would be completely abandoned under the Obama plan.

If astronauts are ever to venture again beyond low-Earth orbit, they will need a vessel
capable of sustaining ultra-long-duration spaceflight, and Orion is currently the only such concept that has undergone serious development.

Much of what has been learnt these past few years will live on in whatever spaceship Nasa eventually chooses to develop:

"We will build on the good work already done on the Orion crew capsule. I've directed [Nasa Administrator] Charlie Bolden to immediately begin developing a rescue vehicle using this technology, so we are not forced to rely on foreign providers if it becomes necessary to quickly bring our people home from the International Space Station. And this Orion effort will be part of the technological foundation for advanced spacecraft to be used in future deep space missions."

So Obama's aim on Thursday was really to persuade doubters that his vision was coherent, that it contained clear, achievable objectives, and that it would maintain America's pride and leadership in human spaceflight.

In other words, Obama went to Kennedy to do a better sales job, to give the speech he probably should have given back in February.

Will his words have the desired effect?

The president is clearly winning over some people. He was accompanied on Air Force One by influential Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon. The former had previously expressed grave reservations about the new vision.

And the promise of a concerted effort to create new jobs along the Space Coast may also persuade some Floridians that the transition away from the shuttle and Constellation programmes might not be so painful after all.

Time will tell.

What Mr Obama will be hoping is that many Americans will finally accept his argument that it is time to stop looking back to Apollo and to try something genuinely new.

The sequence in his speech that caught my attention was this one:

"I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We've been there before. Buzz has been there. There's a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it's more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach - and operate at - a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward. And that's what this strategy does. And that's how we will ensure that our leadership in space is even stronger in this new century than it was in the last."

Norm Augustine, the former Lockheed Martin chief executive, took to the podium after Mr Obama. Mr Augustine, you will remember, .

He said something pretty similar. He related the story how when his committee spoke to young people about Constellation and the idea of going back to the Moon, these kids dismissed it as uninspiring - as being the "policy of their grandfathers".

If you want to read the president's entire speech, you can do so . If you want more detail on the Obama vision, this is available at the Office of Science and Technology Policy website.

And if you didn't see the criticism of the president's policy from Apollo legends Armstrong, Cernan and Lovell earlier this week, you can read that .

And, of course, you can tell me what you think below.

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A perfect day. Cryosat-2, Europe's ice mission, is .

After losing the original mission on launch in 2005, the European Space Agency (Esa) returned for a second go with a near-identical satellite. And this time, the modified nuclear missile entrusted with delivering the spacecraft to orbit did its job brilliantly.

Controllers wanted the satellite injected into an orbit some 717km above the Earth. The Dnepr put Cryosat virtually on the button. It actually went in 108m higher than requested.

A discussion will now be had as to whether the orbit is allowed to degrade naturally to the optimum height or if some propellant is sent surging through the spacecraft's British thrusters to force the issue.

Even if some of Cryosat's consumables are expended, there will be plenty in reserve to serve what engineers hope - expect - to be a long mission. They'll be disappointed if they don't get 10 years out of this spacecraft. It's quite amazing how long these endeavours now last.

That's all good news for the scientists who've had to wait more than 10 years to get their hands on Cryosat's ice data.

The mission's radar altimeter will run a tight path over the poles, returning not just unprecedented information on the thickness and shape of Arctic and Antarctic ice, but a new view of what's happening to ocean waters no longer covered by ice.

At the moment we have virtually no idea how the Arctic Ocean is responding to the 11%-per-decade decline in summer ice coverage. It's an important issue. If winds are allowed to work on open water, they may change the pattern of currents and that could have climate consequences far beyond the polar north.

Scientists will push the very hard. 2005's enforced delay means researchers have had more time to learn how to interpret the altimetry data.

An intensive validation campaign has been conducted in the intervening years which involved running an instrument somewhat similar to Cryosat's on an aircraft, and to take manual measurements for comparison.

As a result, the Cryosat team will now be able to see very fine detail in the radar data, including the seasonal snow layers in the ice and the disjointed and fractured ridges associated with the multi-year sea-ice, the stuff that is most resistant to melting.

Cryosat is important because it is now the only dedicated ice mission in orbit after the failure last year of the American Icesat mission. It's Europe that's keeping watch.

Former ICBMsÌý Ariane 5Ìý VegaÌý SoyuzÌý

It gives you a sense now for the scale of ambition in these parts for Earth observation (EO). We are in a midst of a golden age.

I've attached a tool to this page which allows you to browse the high-profile missions Europe intends to launch in the coming decade - more than 20 spacecraft approved and funded to the tune of several billion euros.

It includes the scientific "" missions like Cryosat which are run by Esa. There are at least four more to add to the three already in orbit. We may even squeeze an eighth mission in before the end of the decade.

Consider also the meteorological missions that Esa and the weather satellite agency Eumetsat conduct together. Four Meteosats will launch this decade - and two very innovative .

There are two under a dustsheet somewhere in Germany that are built and ready to fly; and that's before a decision is made (probably in the next 12 months) to commission their follow-ons. The first next-generation Metop will launch no earlier than 2018, just off my chart.

And then there is the , an ongoing sequence of Earth observers commissioned as part of a joint EU/Esa project to acquire long-term data-sets, not just for environmental monitoring but for security purposes as well - natural disaster mitigation and response, etc.

My EO rocket tool is - how shall we say? - in "beta" format, so if you think I've missed an important mission or seriously mistimed the launch date, let me know.

I've stuck with the big pan-European missions, the ones anchored in Esa. There is no space for example for those predominantly national missions which have wide participation. I'm thinking of the likes of the to measure ocean height and which will launch in 2013.

I'm also very interested to see how . The Japanese are doing this. They have an experiment sitting on the Kibo module studying ozone and other trace gases.

Esa wants to hang similar experiments off its Columbus lab. The ISS allows you to be reactive and innovative, flying sensors that demonstrate new techniques. If they don't quite deliver on their promise, need a tweak or simply break down - you can take them off and bring them back to Earth.

If a fully formed satellite like Cryosat has an issue - that's it.

A few closing thoughts.

The desire expressed by President Obama in his 2011 budget request to means we really are heading for exciting times. The Americans can bring a huge amount of money to bear on the issue. We've all obsessed about Constellation these past weeks and overlooked the EO commitment (a budget of $1.8bn for 2011, rising to $2.2bn in 2015). Esa and Nasa will have a pow-wow in the next few days on how they can better tie their EO programmes together.

And then there is the newly established UK Space Agency. It, too, intends to have a big Earth observation focus at its International Space Innovation Centre (ISIC) at Harwell in Oxfordshire, the site of a new Esa technical facility.

The UKSA (I still don't know how to say it) wants the ISIC to be a hub for British EO expertise, involved in both controlling spacecraft and in processing their data and products. The UK Space Agency "expects" Britain to lead the later this decade.

5-Precusor will do atmospheric composition monitoring. It will be a pollution eye-in-the-sky.

Watch this space.

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There is a lot of emotion swirling around the American space agency (Nasa) at the moment, and it's not just among the thousands of US space workers who're losing their jobs.

The emotion goes right to the top.

Maj-Gen Charlie Bolden has given a tear-filled-but-determined interview to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã in which he reflects on the end of the space shuttle programme and the battle to win over critics of the .

The Nasa administrator is in a dog-fight, and he knows it.

The White House wants to shut down development of the , its , together with the rest of the .

In their place is a $6bn commitment to seed a vibrant commercial rocket sector to lift astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), and a promise to engage in an intensive R&D effort to find "game-changing technologies" that can take people beyond low-Earth orbit.

The Obama administration says Constellation was on an unsustainable path - realisation of its goals was stretching off into the distance and at enormous cost.

But Congress doesn't like the replacement vision. To many politicians in Washington, the new strategy lacks an identifiable architecture, a timetable and even a destination. Simply put - many Americans want to know where US astronauts are going, in which ship and when; and right now "they just don't get it".

It's Charlie Bolden's job to make people get it - to make them understand. So, how do you think he is doing? You may well have seen some of his Congressional appearances, and the speeches he's given of late.

There are those who think he's just sold the vision badly; there are others who think he's got the impossible sell.

Charlie Bolden, himself, says he was insufficiently prepared to roll out and explain the president's plan. He's made that confession on a number of occasions now and repeats it in the Ö÷²¥´óÐã interview with our Washington correspondent Philippa Thomas.

What do you make of his very public displays of emotion? We've seen Charlie Bolden swallow hard several times as he discusses the end of the shuttle. In our interview, the passion overwhelms him for a few moments. The tears flow:

"It is very difficult... it's really difficult. It's a programme that has gone for 30 years and it's been incredible. And you know during the programme I've unfortunately had an opportunity to watch or witness the loss of two vehicles, but most importantly 14 people. On the first crew that we lost on the Challenger, they were very, very, very, very close friends because I had trained with them. Mike Smith on the crew I had been in school with. So they were really close friends. It was a flight so close on the heels of my first flight; I had landed just 10 days prior to Challenger."

And speaking of the shuttle workers in Florida, he adds:

"Shuttle becomes like a person to them, and so they're very attached to them and as each vehicle flies its last flight, they have a really difficult time. Unless you've been in this programme, people don't understand that; and they think we're crazy."

I urge you to watch the video because a transcription can never really convey the full emotion of the message.

This is an important month for Nasa, Charlie Bolden and the president's plan.

Next week, on 15 April, Barack Obama will visit Florida's Space Coast to take part in a special conference.

Many are hoping the president will use the opportunity to elucidate some sort of compromise, one that retains elements of the soon-to-close Constellation programme.

This might include a clearer roadmap to a big new rocket, or a promise to continue with the Orion crewship, albeit in a less ambitious form.

Some politicians in Washington are not in a mood to wait, however, and have already introduced legislation that would mandate Nasa to keep flying the shuttle. They dislike the idea of US astronauts having to rely on Russian Soyuz rockets to get to the ISS while America develops its new era of commercial launchers and capsules.

These senators and representatives think the gap should be filled by extending shuttle operations beyond the end of this year.

That's something Charlie Bolden tells us quite firmly should not happen:

"It is time to move on. It's incredibly important for Nasa to try to get to the point where we can begin to explore again. [That's] not to say that what we've done in low-Earth orbit is not exploration. It is, but it's a different kind of exploration; it's scientific exploration; it's medical, it's biomedical research and the like. There are planets and other heavenly bodies out there waiting for us to come, and we can only do that if we move away from shuttle, [and] move on to a heavy-lift launch vehicle and the type of vehicle that will enable us to get away from low-Earth orbit, and do the types of things that people thought we were going to be doing in the Apollo era."

It would cost something on the order of $2-3bn a year to keep the shuttle flying. It's a very expensive vehicle to maintain and operate. That's part of the reason for wanting to retire it in the first place.

To restart production of shuttle components would not be straight forward.

Hundreds of workers have already been laid off. Extending operations would mean rehiring these people, only then to lay them off a second time when the commercial rockets and capsules are introduced later this decade.

In addition, if $2-3bn a year was diverted to more shuttle flights, the money could not then be spent on a replacement vehicle and the other technologies necessary to take humans beyond low-Earth orbit - somewhere the shuttle has never been equipped to fly.

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What do you do with an orbiting scientific satellite designed to measure the state of polar ice when it's moving over the equator?

There is a fascinating map showing the places on Earth where the upcoming will be making detailed observations.

As you'd expect, the measurement campaign is at its most intense over the Arctic and the Antarctic. The European Space Agency satellite has been equipped with an advanced to measure surface heights. It will record the rates of change in land and marine ice thickness very precisely.

But gaze across the map and you'll see plenty of locations with no ice at all, where Cryosat's instrument will still be busy gathering data.

For sure, we see ice fields at low latitudes, such as in the Himalayas (5) and in the Andes (2) - but in the middle of the Pacific? And in Central Africa?

All this illustrates some routine, unsung functions of running a space mission... and some quite intriguing ones, too.

The region in the Pacific (1) includes calibration zones. To make its measurements of Arctic sea-ice thickness, Cryosat has to see both the top of the ice and the top of the water (it's then a relatively simple calculation to get to the overall volume).

The calibration zone in the Pacific is where the performance of the Cryosat instrument over water will be checked out. The squares denote areas of historically low wave height. Try to avoid getting caught in a sail boat in these places as the wind tends not to blow that strongly that often.

By looking at a flat ocean surface in these places, the Cryosat team will learn more about the internal noise of their instrument, and that means they'll be better able to interpret the radar signals during the all important science observation phases.

In general, many of the purple squares you see on land in this map indicate observations for hydrology - using Cryosat to investigate lake and river levels. The classic example here, I guess, is the Amazon (3).

Cryosat's instrument should be an excellent tool to study the behaviour of water surfaces, and several scientific groups will use the spacecraft to observe, in particular, coastal locations - places where past generations of radar instruments have struggled to get the necessary resolution.

Cryosat should see detail at below the kilometre scale, on the order of a few hundred metres.

I draw your attention though to Africa (4). Some of the data here will go into developing a tool that is about as far from ice-monitoring as you could imagine: a model to forecast the risk of malaria.

The of this continent. Of the 800,000 or so deaths that result globally from malaria each year, about 90% of them occur in Africa and the vast majority of those deaths are in children under five.

A group of Spanish scientists have been working on a project to use radar altimetry to detect the presence of mosquito breeding grounds - the puddles and ponds of water where the insects lay their eggs.

Water has a very distinct radar echo.

If this information is tied to other data-sets, such as temperature and precipitation, it might be possible to produce risk infection maps for great swathes of Africa. The authorities could then take pre-emptive measures, including targeted spraying of insecticides.

It's a very novel application for radar altimetry data; but one which Mònica Roca, who's been working on the Malarsat Project, believes has great potential:

"The footprint area of radar is very big compared to other instruments. It is more than one kilometre square with the classic altimeter, and that doesn't give you the resolution to detect little puddles. Nevertheless, you have a lot of accuracy in the differences in receive power which means although you cannot say where the ponds are, you can say they are present. It's based on how much power you receive and the shape of this echo."

Cryosat's radar will have a far better resolution than the altimeters used in the project so far, such as the one on Europe's Envisat spacecraft.

However, Cryosat's very tight orbital path over the poles means it does not see locations at lower latitudes very frequently. A lot of change can occur in the time it takes for the satellite to come back over the same spot.

But the Spanish group hope at the very least to establish the principle of their malaria mapping technique.

If they can do that, then when radar technology with Cryosat performance is put on a spacecraft with more favourable orbital characteristics, the technique could really take off.

The European Space Agency's , due for launch in 2013, is expected to be just such a platform.

All of this, of course, is an aside to Cryosat's main mission - which is to make detailed measurements of the state of Arctic and Antarctic ice.

If you look at a picture of Cryosat, you'll see its radar instrument has a double antenna arrangement on the underside of the spacecraft.

When the satellite is travelling over sea ice (light green colour in the map), it needs just the one antenna. When it's travelling over the edges of the continents (dark green), it goes into "interferometric mode".

By listening to the radar echoes with an additional antenna offset from the first by about a metre, the instrument can sense much better the shape of the ice below, returning more reliable information on slopes and ridges.

This is important for the study of Greenland and Antarctica, and gives Cryosat a unique ability to discern what is happening at the edges of the ice sheets. These are the locations where some of the biggest, fastest changes have been taking place.

Keep your fingers crossed for Cryosat. Its launch on a Dnepr rocket is timed for Thursday 8 April at 1357 GMT (1457 BST; 1557 CEST). After the failure in orbit of the last year, the European mission will become the only dedicated ice mapper in space.

We should get at least five years work out of it.

US President Barack Obama is promising a budget to get Icesat-2 into space by late 2015.

To really understand climate trends you must have continuous, cross-calibrated, long-term data-sets. You don't get that if you have extended periods with no satellite coverage of key parameters.

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