Plus: Sweet 3-D Printing and NASA’s Space Shuttle Era Comes to a Close.

Space Shuttle Era Comes to a Close
Space shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth safely yesterday morning, bringing to a close the 135th and final mission of NASA’s 30-year-long Space Shuttle program.

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Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

“Mission complete, Houston,” mission commander Christopher Ferguson radioed in after Atlantis came to wheelstop at Kennedy Space Center’s Runway 15. “After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle has earned its place in history. It’s come to a final stop.”

Overall, Atlantis spent 307 days in space and traveled nearly 126 million miles during its 33 flights.

2-Minute Visual History of the Spacewalk
“If there is a defining activity for NASA’s Space Shuttle program, it is the spacewalk, or extra-vehicular activity,” The Atlantic says. “160 spacewalks were made in the assembly of the ISS [International Space Station] alone.”

This video offers a 2 min. tour of the history of extravehicular activity (EVA), from the first during the Gemini program to the final spacewalk last week:

Sweet 3-D Printing
There’s already been a great deal of excitement about 3-D printing technology, but what about a printing system that can produce chocolate? Researchers in Britain have built a 3-D printer that allows users to create their own designs on a computer and reproduce them physically in three-dimensional form using chocolate in lieu of the standard plastic or resin.

“Using a process that creates the product by building up layer upon layer of material, the research team, led by Dr. Liang Hao, chose to experiment with chocolate,” according to sustainable-design blog Inhabitat. “Being inexpensive, easily malleable and, not to mention, delicious, chocolate was perfect to play with, as it yields no waste (excess can be melted down or eaten!).”

However, the research has presented some challenges.

“Chocolate is not an easy material to work with because it requires accurate heating and cooling cycles,” the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which is managing the project, explains. “These variables then have to be integrated with the correct flow rates for the 3-D printing process. Researchers overcame these difficulties with the development of new temperature and heating control systems.”

The researchers are currently working on a user interface for the device and hoping to make it available to online retailers, who could then sell custom-designed chocolates.

Cheers.