China launched its third manned space flight Thursday night, as Shenzhou VII lifted off at 9:07PM from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu Province, which is in western China. The mission is expected to last about three days, and is centered around the nation’s planned first-ever spacewalk (which will take place either Friday or Saturday).
The three taikonauts (from the Chinese word for star) on the flight are all 42-year-old fighter pilots—Zhai Zhigang, Jing Haipeng, and Liu Boming—who have been training together for several years. Zhai is expected to make the spacewalk, supported by Russian spaceflight experts. And in an interesting technology-sharing move, one of the astronauts will wear a Chinese-made Feitian space suit, while the other participating in the walk will wear a Russian suit.
This CNN article and this New York Times article each have good pictures.

NASA is now offering, on its web site, live audio feed of conversations between astronauts aboard the International Space Station and flight controllers on the ground. The streaming audio transmissions—available 24 hours a day, seven days a week—include NASA commentary during specific station mission events and regularly scheduled space station commentary on NASA Television (Monday through Friday at 10AM Central time). NASA already provides this space-to-ground communication with commentary during space shuttle missions. The audio is available from the main NASA TV page.

NASA’s Glory satellite will be “the first mission dedicated to understanding the effects of particles in the atmosphere and the Sun’s variability on our climate.”
The go with this Earth-circling mission, NASA is offering the chance to “Send Your Name Around the Earth”, via a web site from which you can sign up to ride with the mission. The site is already up and ready to take your name(s). After filling in the form, it offers you a printable certificate of participation, which includes a picture of the satellite. All the names submitted will be recorded on a microchip that will be included in the spacecraft. Deadline to submit names is 1 November 2008.
The Glory satellite “will allow scientists to measure airborne particles more accurately from space than ever before. The particles, known as ‘aerosols,’ are tiny bits of material found in Earth’s atmosphere, like dust and smog.”
“Undoubtedly, greenhouse gases cause the biggest climatic effect,” said Michael Mishchenko, the Glory project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. “But the uncertainty in the aerosol effect is the biggest uncertainty in climate at the present.”
Glory will carry two scientific instruments, the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor, or APS, and the Total Irradiance Monitor, or TIM, and two cameras for cloud identification. The APS instrument will help quantify the role of aerosols as natural and human-produced agents of climate change more accurately than existing measurement tools. The TIM instrument will continue 30 years of measuring total solar irradiance, the amount of energy radiating from the sun to Earth, with improved accuracy and stability. Understanding the sun’s energy is an important key to understanding climate change on Earth.
Glory is scheduled for launch in June 2009 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Glory will orbit as part of the Afternoon Constellation, or “A-Train,” a series of Earth-observing satellites. The A-Train spacecraft follow each other in close formation, crossing the equator a few minutes apart shortly after 1:30PM local time each day. The A-Train orbits Earth once every 100 minutes.
For more information on Glory, see glory.gsfc.nasas.gov.