Mohawk Valley Astronomical Society - MVAS

08/25/2026

Another spacewalk is underway, installing a new communications antenna outside of the ISS! Live coverage in progress on the NASA Live platforms.

Astronauts Anil Menon of NASA and Sophie Adenot of ESA set their spacesuits to battery power at 8:27 a.m. EDT today signifying the start of their spacewalk to finish installing a high-speed antenna. More... https://go.nasa.gov/4gwcOdI

08/25/2026

A blast from the past, and a great "Did you know that..."
This one shows an example of Rope Memory, literally copper wires woven to "hard wire" a program of binary ones and zeros into the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) for the Lunar Lander!! Could never be changed once completed!!!

Once a wire was threaded through this memory, the code inside it could never be changed again. Not with a software update, not with a patch, not ever. If a bug slipped through, it flew to the Moon anyway.

This is core rope memory, the storage system behind the Apollo Guidance Computer's software, and it worked nothing like modern memory chips. Each tiny copper ring represents a single bit, and the program itself was encoded by whether a wire was threaded through a ring or routed around it, wire through the core meant a 1, wire bypassing it meant a 0. There was no erasing, no rewriting, no debugging after the fact. Once woven, the code was permanent, hardwired directly into the physical object.

The weavers themselves genuinely were often experienced women recruited specifically for their skill with textile work, since the job demanded extreme manual precision, threading thousands of wires through tiny cores by hand, in exact sequence, with functionally zero room for error. Some crews nicknamed it "LOL memory," for "little old lady," reflecting who often did the weaving, though the workforce also included younger technicians trained specifically for this task. A single AGC rope could take months to weave, and once finished, engineers couldn't simply patch a mistake, they had to unweave and rebuild sections by hand.

Picture handing a program to someone, watching them literally sew it into fabric thread by thread, and then trusting that exact physical object to fly a quarter million miles and land two men on the Moon without a single line of it able to be fixed afterward.

This wasn't some fallback backup system either, it was the primary software running the Apollo Guidance Computer for both the Command Module and Lunar Module, meaning the Moon landing itself depended on wires threaded correctly by hand.

Does it change how you think about software reliability, knowing the code that landed Apollo 11 couldn't be updated once it left the factory?

08/24/2026

Woo hoo, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope continues to march toward the August 30 launch. Today they completed one of the final steps, placing the telescope safely inside of the two-part fairing that will protect it during launch and liftoff. Next step, to the launch pad where it will be placed on top of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy!

Roman is packed up and ready to roll! 🚀

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now encapsulated in the Falcon Heavy fairing ahead of a targeted launch on Aug. 30 from Kennedy.

Next stop, the hangar at Launch Complex 39A. Read: https://go.nasa.gov/4c9hkxt

08/24/2026

One of the top favorite summer constellations is Sagittarius. Although it is called the Archer, most of us call it the Teapot because when you are in a dark sky site you can the steam rising from the teapot spout -- which of course, is our Milky Way galaxy!! Check out the article by EarthSky for details.

Look for the constellation one evening soon. Its brightest stars form the shape of a . The spout of the Teapot points to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And binoculars will reveal a wealth of amazing nebulae and star clusters - denizens of the deep sky - within the boundaries of Sagittarius. Tonight the bright gibbous moon hangs near the Teapot. Block the light of the moon to see Sagittarius' stars.

Read more at: https://earthsky.org/constellations/sagittarius-heres-your-constellation/

08/23/2026

Sit back and relax as you enjoy your aerial tour of Schiaparelli Crater on Mars!

08/22/2026

Well, this will be a huge accomplishment if successful...
China is launching an uncrewed lander tomorrow, destination for a site a few miles away from the Moon's south pole where Shackleton crater is located! The south pole region is also the Artemis destination, because it is believed water ice is in some of its deep, dark craters where sunlight never reaches.

China is landing at the Moon's south pole, launching tomorrow.
The yellow star at the bottom is their intended site, 23 miles from the pole. The top image is where the US is targeting to land, fairly soon. Lots of overlap.
Power and water are key. The hilltops have near-permanent sunshine for power. The black craters are always in shadow, likely with frozen water in them.
An important moment in history as we start to settle the Moon. It's the 8th continent, bigger than Africa. How we choose to cooperate matters. www.lunarledger.space

08/21/2026

New solar arrays being prepared for launch to the ISS in the next cargo mission -- to increase power availability onboard the station.

08/21/2026

A fascinating look at a new microscope onboard the ISS -- Extant Life Volumetric Imaging System, or ELVIS -- and a very surprising experiment with a unique Earth bacterium named Colwellia psychrerythraea which is, as organisms go, almost aggressively hard to kill. It lives in conditions where other organisms cannot survive. Last year, ELVIS was observing an experiment onboard ISS, and researchers got a huge surprise!! Info in the article, very interesting to read.
The ELVIS microscope took over 10 years to develop, and its technology approach may help future missions look for life in other places in our solar system, including watery moons of Jupiter and Saturn!!!! 😲

For three weeks, a microscope onboard the ISS recorded very little. Then a single bacterium appeared on screen and started to swim.

The organism was Colwellia psychrerythraea, an Arctic microbe that can survive frozen solid for months on Earth. Jay Nadeau, a professor of physics and biomedical engineering at Portland State University, chose it to test her team’s new holographic microscope because she trusted it to survive almost anything.

But in space, while astronaut Nicole Ayers was running the tests, the bacterium did something surprising. Full story: https://ow.ly/7zkL50ZCngJ

08/21/2026

Hmmm, will active sunspot AR4513 lead to aurora activity once it moves closer to "aiming" at Earth?

News from the : Newly arrived group AR4513 blasted out 2 M flares over the past day. One of them, an M8.1, almost reached the X flare threshold. This region has rotated fully into view, and we can see it has the most volatile magnetic setup possible. That means more big flares could be on the way!

Find out more with EarthSky's daily sun news: https://earthsky.org/sun/sun-news-activity-solar-flare-cme-aurora-updates/