The tribute will be used to honor the astronauts who died while working with the space program. Astronauts from the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, as well Apollo 1 will be a part of the remembrance. An observance will take place at Arlington National Cemetary on February 1, with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and other senior NASA officials in attendance.

A wreath-laying ceremony will also take place that day at 10 am EST at the Space Mirror Memorial in the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The Space Mirror Memorial was dedicated in 1991, to honor astronauts who lost their lives in the space program. It has been declared a National Memorial by the U.S. congress and is maintained by the non-profit Astronauts memorial Foundation, which is also hosting the observance on Friday.

The Kennedy ceremony will be streaming live on NASA Television. A tribute video for fallen astronauts prepared by NASA can be seen below, and an interactive slideshow is also available.

“This is the first look at the fully calibrated, digital dust data from the Apollo 14 and 15 missions,” said David Williams, an NSSDC data specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The digital data from the two missions’ dust detectors has not been archived before, and NASA estimates that a year and a half of the data have never been studied. The new data can be used in a long-term analysis of the dust readings. The restoration of the data is part of the Lunar Data Project, a n effort to provide Apollo scientific data in modern formats.

The data was restored in a tedious manner, with an undergrad from the Florida Institute of Technology named Marie McBride going through data sets and separating raw detector counts from temperatures and other information. An incomplete second set of data then indicated how raw counts could be converted to usable measurements. The second data set had to be converted from microfilm, then synched up to the first set.

Though the state of the data may suggest it, scientists haven’t abandoned their studies of lunar dust completely. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which launched in 2009, has taken lunar dust measurements. Next year’s launch of NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) will begin a new phase in studying the moon’s dust.

“Just last week, LRO did some important measurements seeking dust profiles in the lunar atmosphere,” said Rich Vondrak, the LRO deputy project scientist at Goddard.

The memorial service was held at the Camargo Club in Cincinnati. Armstrong was once a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. The private service was attended by close family and friends, including Armstrong’s fellow Apollo 11 astronauts Michael Collins (left) and Buzz Aldrin (right), seen in the photo below.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden released a statement regarding the passing of Armstrong, and hinted that the manned mission to Mars is still being planned:

Today, we pay tribute to a pioneering American; an explorer, a patriot and an individual who, with “one small step,” achieved an impossible dream. Family, friends and colleagues of Neil’s gathered to reflect on his extraordinary life and career, and offer thanks for the many blessings he shared with us along the way.

His remarkable achievements will be forever remembered, and his grace and humility will always be admired. As we take the next giant leap forward in human exploration of our vast universe, we stand on the shoulders of this brave, reluctant hero. Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon paved the way for others to be the ‘first’ to step foot on another planet. We have an obligation to carry on this uniquely American legacy.

A grateful nation offers praise and salutes a humble servant who answered the call and dared to dream.

(Photos courtesy NASA/Bill Ingalls)

The problem of inconvenience will disappear, but the high price will continue to be a problem. For years the Russians charged people $25 million to launch into low Earth orbit, recently it went up to $35 million. A company named Excalibur Almaz has announced that it is selling tickets to lunar orbit for the low rate of only $100 million! I understand that it is expensive, but for an upstart it really seems like they are just trying to fund their company that hasn’t even had a single launch yet.

When will the launch happen? there is no info yet. As of right now, Excalibur Almaz isn’t even doing flight tests of its capsule until next year. So I could see them being prepared to actually launch a human by 2015-2016.

Since the beginning, HTC has been a huge supporter of Windows Phone although in the last quarter, Nokia has taken the number one spot for the OS. This is likely due to the strong sales of Lumia 800 from Nokia. Kodera confirmed the Titan II from HTC, announced at the beginning of the year in Las Vegas at CES, would be available outside of the United States and to other countries with LTE networks. HTC’s history of innovation in 4G technology includes delivering the first 4G powered devices to each major carrier in the U.S. Australia was another country in particular that was named by Kodera where the phone will be available.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden states that the new budget “in-sources jobs, creates capabilities here at home, and strengthens our workforce, all while opening the next great chapter in American exploration.” Insourcing takes on a whole new meaning, when jobs are literally being kept on Earth.

So far, the Obama administration has invested over $1 billion in the private development of new spacecraft, as the old shuttles are becoming science museum antiques, and astronauts are relying on Russia to get into space. Obama’s budget also funds the Space Transport System, a new multistage rocket similiar to the Apollo designs. Bolden said the first flight of a manned commercial vehicle using the Space Transport System would likely launch before 2017. He also states that the first manned mission using the nuclear-propelled Orion system would launch after 2021.

Not everyone is happy with NASA’s new direction. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, wonders what the point of focusing on new technology might be, when extraterrestrial life is everyone’s most popular question. “I encourage whoever made this decision to ask around; everyone on Earth wants to know if there is life on other worlds,” Nye says. Obama’s plan also allows funding for the James Webb telescope, set to replace the Hubble.

"Google Gears Grind Out Web Apps"

Google wrapped up its Developer Day in Sydney, Australia, with a handful of announcements. One of them will help make its many applications available to people who are temporarily without a web connection, like business travelers.

"Unfortunately, today’s web browsers lack some fundamental building blocks necessary to make offline web applications a reality," Google’s Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson said in their post on the new Google Gears blog.

"In other words, we found we needed to add a few new gears to the web machinery before we could get our apps to run offline," they said of Google Gears. "It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline."

The browser extension will work with any Gears-enabled application. Though Google is working with Adobe, as well as browser makers Mozilla and Opera, Gears sounds like a project that will compete with Adobe Apollo.

Three core modules for Gears have been released: LocalServer, Database, and WorkerPool. "Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps," said Boodman and Arvidsson.

One of the first projects for Google Gears is a new version of the Google Reader for RSS feeds. The comapny’s Chris Wetherell talked about that on the Google Reader blog:

Once you’ve installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they’re available even when you don’t have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the “Offline” link in the top right of Google Reader.

We gave the offline reader option a try on one of our machines, and noticed one immediate improvement the offline experience has over the online one. It’s a heck of a lot faster in performance working with those 2,000 items locally, rather than waiting for Reader to churn through the next 60 items in the Boing Boing feed.

Google Gears only grabbed the text from the feeds, though. No images or videos offline. That certainly helps the download speed in getting feeds into the Gears database, but in the case of feeds like Boing Boing’s it really kills the more interesting parts of many of their posts.

Adobe Flex Enters Open Source

Through their shift of the Flex SDK to an open source model, Adobe has presented a compelling challenge to developers who may have considered trying Microsoft’s Silverlight platform.

Microsoft’s entry into cross-browser, rich Internet application creation just hit a big speed bump. Open source developers who inherently mistrust Microsoft on some level are likely to check out Adobe Flex for their cross-browser app construction needs.

This news also helps boost support for Adobe’s Apollo product. Apollo allows developers to take an application created for online use, and repurpose it as a desktop application running on top of the Apollo framework.

Adobe announced the release schedule for open sourcing Flex on their wiki:

The source code for the Flex framework is already available within the free distribution of the current Flex 2 SDK. By this summer, Adobe plans to put in place most of the infrastructure (public bug database and public daily builds) required to run the Flex SDK as an open source project. We expect to complete the transition to a fully open source project (source code for the compiler, infrastructure for community contributions, etc.) by the end of 2007.

Companies that wish to obtain commercial licenses for the Flex SDK will be able to do so. That applies to other Adobe products that use the Flex SDK, like Flash Player and ColdFusion.

Robert Scoble has a couple of videos taken with the Adobe Flex team. They discuss the news about open sourcing Flex, and review Flex’s architecture and components as related to the announcement.

The challenge web application developers face comes when their desired audience takes their computer away from the Internet. With no connection there is no productivity, and that has probably hampered efforts to really drive a broader userbase into web-based applications.

Adobe’s Luis Polanco, senior product manager for Apollo, talked to WebProNews about the cross-operating system runtime ahead of a fully booked ‘Apollo Camp’ on Friday that took place in San Francisco.

Apollo can be used to make an online application ready for offline use. The business traveling audience comes to mind, as viable airline Internet options have yet to take hold in the United States. It’s difficult to wean people away from Microsoft Office if they can’t use a web-based choice when off the Net.

The runtime enables developers working in Adobe’s Flash or Flex, or in the HTML and JavaScript world, to use those tools and create their Rich Internet Applications (as Adobe likes to call them) for desktop deployment.

Support for PDF will be coming later this year; Polanco said deeper Ajax support likewise would be delivered later in 2007. With this launch, Polanco said Adobe wants to get feedback as developers evaluate the runtime, which is freely available as a download.

EBay has been working with Apollo ahead of the formal public announcement. The online marketplace has been building an application to extend notifications to the desktop. When offline, eBay users will be able to create listing with the app, and have them automatically upload to eBay on reconnection.

Windows and Macintosh receive support at the OS level out of the gate. Adobe has plans to add Linux support in a future version; Linux fans who have waited a long time for an updated Flash Player from Adobe for their preferred OS may be taking a ‘wait and see’ view here.

Polanco said a benefit of Apollo would be the ‘Virtual Ubiquity’ of Apollo applications. Through the leveraging of local file system access, "experiences are the same as online" with web-based applications, he noted.

Such access made us curious about security implications for Apollo applications. Polanco stressed that mechanisms in those apps, coupled with sound developer practices, will mitigate those concerns.

Response from blogs observing the launch has been generally positive. Michael Arrington waxed enthusiastically about Apollo at TechCrunch, while Jay Fortner wrote at ReadWriteWeb that Adobe is "really engaging developers and bloggers in the roll-out process."