Shuttle mission STS-116 landed in Florida almost an hour ago at 5:32pm EST. The NASA landing blog said the flight covered 5.3 million miles, orbited the Earth 204 times, and lasted just under 12 days, 21 hours. (I wonder how this duration compares to the other shuttle flights…) Check out Yahoo!’s Shuttle Full Coverage news page or NASA’s STS-116 Mission page for news and multimedia. I like this picture of the first spacewalk — the astronauts are doing construction on the International Space Station while in orbit over New Zealand and Cook Straight in the Pacific Ocean:
California Railroad Museum Originally uploaded by brianc. I recently learned that this picture from the California Railroad Museum is being included in the Schmap Guide for Sacramento. Very cool.
Last night I attended the first “confab.yahoo” at Yahoo HQ. The topic was Prediction Markets moderated by James Surowiecki, author of the popular book “The Wisdom of Crowds”. Overall this was a great learning event and I’m glad Yahoo! is starting this series of micro-conferences and making them open to the public like this. For a great summary of the event, check out ReadWriteWeb’s post: Prediction Markets at confab.yahoo.
Yesterday we caught the nighttime launch of shuttle Discovery on mission STS-116. Check the NASA site for more images from the launch and ongoing updates from the shuttle. In addition to delivering another truss for the International Space Stations, this mission is also going to rewire the entire electrical system!
Several people have asked me about this strange-looking message and wondering if it’s spam. It’s not — this is just us giving some advance warning about a brief scheduled downtime tomorrow night for maintenance. We’re trying to be proactive in communicating this downtime, but hopefully we don’t make too big a deal about it.