Shuttle Glides to an Incident-Free Landing

I found another NASA article that interested me. It deals with the shuttle and how it has safely landed. This landing marks NASA's resumetion of building the international space station. Antlantis was found to have a piece of plastic jammed in its tiles, but the engineer team fixed it.
This article can be related to our phsics class because we are studying acceleration right now, and I think that specifically where the article says that the shuttle had to be slowed down to 205 mph to reenter the earth's atmosphere is of key interest because the decelleration there must have been very fast. I think that the shuttle goes around the earth a lot faster than that to stay in orbit, and those rocket engines had to have a lot of power to slow the shuttle down in 2 minutes.

Puzzling Puffy Planet, Less Dense Than Cork, Is Discovered

I was very interested in astronomy when I was younger, so this article seemed to stick out for me. It is also one that was not discussed in class. It is about a new planet that has been found in a galaxy 450 light-years away. It is unique in that it seems to be as dense as a wine bottle cork. They say that it would float on water, and I don't know where you'd find an ocean big enough to hold it. Yea, I know that they just mean that it would theoretically. It is about 25% as dense as water. What interests me most about this article is that they can figure out how dense something is from 450 light-years away. Apparently they can only even tell that it is there by light fluctuations from the star it revolves around. That just amazes me, and leads me to question if their results can even be justified. If I actually had time on my hands, I'd like to look into their research and see what this is all about, and how they can make these educated guesses.
I think this can related to physics through kinematics with the whole light dim thing. They use the light dim to estimate how long it takes the planet to move into the way of the star and then out again. This has a lot to do with motion, and the study of it. Probably involving hard to figure out motion equations and reasoning.
If it takes the light from the star 450 years to get here, is that planet really the same anymore? Because, using the reasoning that light is required to see anything, the light must have to bounce off the planet for us to see it. Our sight is the collection of what light was originally bounced off that planet; which takes 450 years to get here. This means that we are seeing the planet 450 years in the past. That's what I think interests me the most about it.

Shuttle Safe to Launch Friday, NASA Says

I was surprised to find an article that would so easily link to what we are doing in our physics class. This article is about one of the fuels cells having erratic readings in the coolent system. They have analyzed the problem and have assessed that it is not bad enough to stop the shuttle from launching. The weather looks good for the launch to be coming up soon.
I'd just like to say that everything in the space program has to do with physics, without knowledge of what was going to happen beforehand using mathematics, there's no way that they could send anything into space. I think that this particular article deals with what we have learned about margin of error. In physics, a scientist must always account for his tools margin of error in taking their readings. This article shows a fuel cell that has been taking erratic readings in the coolent system, but they are going to launch anyway; therefor they must know that their margin of error is still within what is good to launch. Also since the measuring device is taking erratic readings, it can be assumed that it has a greater margin of error than one that is functioning normally.
Another aspect of the space program is the measurement of distances to be used in the mathematics to make the whole program work. That is what the space program is about, and it basically desribes what physics is.