and while most college students are sleeping off the effects of a night out, CAPE members are hard at work preparing to apply for a chance to launch a satellite with NASA.  Everyone is very excited about this opportunity, and the fact that donuts and coffee were provided by Nick Pugh. Thanks Nick!

Just a heads up that the website here at http://ulcape.org is still moving along slowly into the twenty-first century.

You may have noticed the new twitter widget in our sidebar. Well, that’s because we now have a twitter account.  You can follow us at http://twitter.com/ulcape.  Oh, and you may have noticed a few other tweets in the sidebar; the widget contains tweets from @ull_eece and @ulcape as well as any tweets with the #ulcape tag or which contain the word ulcape.

So, that’s all for now.  Enjoy our new features, follow us on twitter, facebook and linkedin and share the news with all of your friends.   Thanks for stopping by.

The CAPE team was visited by Dr. Kumar Krishen the ST Senior Scientist / Lead Technologist for the Advanced Planning Office of NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas yesterday afternoon. Dr. Krishen gave a very enlightening presentation on the current problems NASA is working to solve, the need for new technologies in the aerospace field, and many other topics. The team is very grateful Dr. Krishen took time out of his day for us, and has learned a great deal. Thank you Dr. Krishen!

This is just to highlight some of the new features available on the website.  One of the more prominent features for our mobile users is the shiny new interface for iPhones, Blackberry’s and a few other mobile devices.  The mobile AJAXiness goodness comes from the guys at BraveNewCode.

Another feature for all of our users include the social bookmarking links at the bottom of this post and any other news post.  This is the social web after all.  So, we at CAPE offer you, the reader the chance to spread some link love with all of your friends real or not.  There are also options for saving to PDF and printing in the lineup as well.

Some of you may have noticed the little snippet above has been around for a while now.  Unfortunately our feedburner was not actually configured to allow email subscriptions so entering your email address just led to an error screen (shame on us). Fortunately, the situation has been rectified with a few simple steps you can subscribe to updates from our website.  You will receive an email anytime a new post is made to the website, but never more than one email a day.  So feel free to enter your email address, sign up and stay up to date.  The email subscription is ran by Google’s FeedBurner and CAPE will not have access to your email address to send you anything including spam. You will just have to trust Google to not be evil.

Lastly, there has been some work done on the wiki side of our website as well. There is no screenshot because it is in nowhere near it’s final state as far as looks are concerned.  However, the behind the scenes foundation is being laid to integrate the wiki (at least visually) with the main site you are viewing now.  Also, much of the important content has been ported over by Wade and myself including the PIC tutorials that were so popular.  All in all, the website is slowly progressing to a unified tool for CAPE to reach the public with.

That just about covers the changes around the website.  Just be sure to check out the photo gallery for some new (well, old) photos from the CAPE team circa 2004.  In the next couple days there should be some more albums from the CAPE-1 days as well.

Yesterday after months of work, we were able to fire up the Thermovac Chamber and have it work! Special thanks to Adam Hebert for spending the time to get us this far!

Adam with the Thermovac Chamber