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Atlantis rolls to pad
After a six-hour trip along the three-and-a-half-mile crawlerway from the Vehicle Assembly Building, space shuttle Atlantis arrives at launch pad 39A for the STS-117 mission.

 Roll starts | Pad arrival

Atlantis rollover
Space shuttle Atlantis emerges from its processing hangar at dawn February 7 for the short trip to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center's Complex 39.

 Leaving hangar | To VAB

Time-lapse movies:
 Pulling in | Sling

Microgravity laboratory
Shuttle Columbia carried the first United States Microgravity Laboratory during its summer 1992 flight to orbit. The Spacelab science expedition was the longest shuttle mission to date, thanks to the new Extended Duration Orbiter equipment flown for the first time. The crew of STS-50 narrate the highlights in this post-flight film.

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Research Project: X-15
The documentary "Research Project: X-15" looks at the rocketplane program that flew to the edge of space in the effort to learn about the human ability to fly at great speeds and aircraft design to sustain such flights.

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Apollo 1 service
On the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, a remembrance service was held January 27 at the Kennedy Space Center's memorial Space Mirror.

 Part 1 | Part 2

Technical look at
Project Mercury

This documentary takes a look at the technical aspects of Project Mercury, including development of the capsule and the pioneering first manned flights of America's space program.

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Ulysses finds surprises from the Sun's south pole
EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY NEWS RELEASE
Posted: February 20, 2007

Although very close to the minimum of its 11-year sunspot cycle, the Sun showed that it is still capable of producing a series of remarkably energetic outbursts - ESA-NASA Ulysses mission revealed.

In keeping with the first and second south polar passes (in 1994 and 2000), the latest high-latitude excursion of the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses mission has already produced some surprises. In mid-December 2006, although very close to the minimum of its 11-year sunspot cycle, the Sun showed that it is still capable of producing a series of remarkably energetic outbursts.

The solar storms, which were confined to the equatorial regions, produced quite intense bursts of particle radiation that were clearly observed by near-Earth satellites. Surprisingly, similar increases in radiation were detected by the instruments on board Ulysses, even though it was three times as far away and almost over the south solar pole. "Particle events of this kind were seen during the second polar passes in 2000 and 2001, at solar maximum," said Richard Marsden, ESA's Ulysses Project Scientist and Mission Manager. "We certainly didn't expect to see them at high latitudes at solar minimum!"

Scientists are busy trying to understand how the charged particles made it all the way to the poles. "Charged particles have to follow magnetic field lines, and the magnetic field pattern of the Sun near solar minimum ought to make it much more difficult for the particles to move in latitude," said Marsden.

One of the puzzles remaining from the first high-latitude passes in 1994 and 1995 has to do with the temperature of the Sun's poles. When Ulysses first passed over the south and then the north solar pole near solar minimum, it measured the temperatures of the large polar coronal holes.

"Surprisingly, the temperature in the north polar coronal hole was about 7 to 8 percent lower compared with the south polar coronal hole," said Professor George Gloeckler, Principal Investigator for the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) on board Ulysses.

"We couldn't tell then whether this was simply due to progressive cooling of both polar coronal holes as the Sun was approaching its minimum level of activity in 1996, or whether this was an indication of a permanently cooler north pole."

Now, as Ulysses again passes over the large polar coronal holes of the Sun at solar minimum we will finally have the answer. Recent SWICS observations show that the average temperature of the southern polar coronal hole at the current solar minimum is as low as it was 10 years ago in the northern polar coronal hole. "This implies that the asymmetry between north and south has switched with the change of the magnetic polarity of the Sun," said Gloeckler. The definitive proof will come when Ulysses measures the temperature of the north polar coronal during the next 15 months.