Well, like many of you already know, a lot of eyes in the media are pointed towards space right now, specifically on the space shuttle's very risky repair mission of the Hubble telescope. If you are one to be interested on this event, then you might be very interested on the following:
To quote: ?Just in time for this week's Shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, our Hubble Educational Spacewalk Simulation (ESS) built for NASA over the past year is live and can be downloaded and installed from NASA.gov! We have an easy link to the NASA-hosted simulation at the top of our homepage at: http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/spacesuits/simulation/index.html
?In "ESS" you can "be the astronaut" going through three major spacewalk tasks to replace components on Hubble. Hear the astronauts? voices (from real training), zoom around the shuttle/hubble and Earth at high speed, get info on the procedures, and look for a series of "lost" objects in the cargo bay. Its a great experience for K-12 students & educators, museums and just plain space fans. This is a windows-only version that requires a good 3D card (not basic chipsets). Other OS versions are in the works.? It is packaged as an installer that puts the program onto your PC and is an approximately 30 meg download. With a game like experience, and excellent graphics and modeling, all in all this is a fun experience and worth checking out.
DigitalSpace.com, a provider of online 3D simulations has joined forces with NASA and has come up with an online, interactive 3D simulation of the space shuttle on a repair mission to the Hubble Telescope. You can move around it. Zoom in, and even look for missing items for the astronauts. There is sound so you can hear the astronauts? conversations.