As long as they do not destroy Slartibartfast's fjords then I am "cool" with it.

I am an Aerospace Engineering/Mathematics Grad Student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I do more theoretical work now, but I think I can offer a little advice.

If you want to stay state side I would also recommend (in no particular order) you look at U of M, Purdue, Georgia Tech, Cornell (Aero/Mech), Caltech, Stanford (Aero/Mech) and the University of Maryland (more aeronautical).

The biggest thing is to get involved with research projects. Look at current professors and their research interests, see if they have anything related to satellite/rocket design. Do not be afraid to ask/e-mail. Professors and grad students alike love getting undergrads involved, perhaps because they usually come free.

If you do look at Michigan I can recommend looking at Professor Cutler and his RAX project or professors in the Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences (AOSS) department. Several people from my graduating class who took Aerosp 483 went on to SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Bigelow Aerospace, so there is a network.

For more U of M information look at:
Professor Cutler: http://aerospace.engin.umich.edu/people/faculty/cutler/
RAX: http://rax.engin.umich.edu/
AOSS: http://aoss.engin.umich.edu/

But think of the police.

Sorry trademark, not copyright.

Due to copyright '*Security Essentials' will not be available, instead it will be the "Apple Security Software Store" or the ASS Store for short.

Has anyone noticed how most of the mainstream: CNN, BBC, etc. have not picked up on this yet?

I hope you are not intending on photographing a meteor from a telescope.

The most common thing to when photographing meteor showers is to point to the pole star and set your SLR (hopefully manual, film based on a tripod with a cable for the shutter) to a B setting and take a shot for a couple of hours. This produces really nice star trails and the occasional meteor.

If you are piggybacking the camera to a telescope you should not have any issues with the motor vibration, but you will need to beware of wind.

Save up your money and buy a Meade LX200, you can now get the older models (I personally think are better) for around 2000$US, combine that with a wedge and reticle eyepiece and you are ready to go. The thing really is a light bucket and something you will be happy with, with a little training you can even work out the periodic error correction with the scope so you can do astrophotography with the camera for the eyepiece.

If that is not satisfactory, build an adjustable wedge and buy a motor that rotates at 15 deg/hour and attach the motor to the top of the wedge with a camera on it.

Are you looking for real CFD software for pressure distributions or are you looking for something that returns lift, drag, side and moments?

On the CFD side: OpenFOAM. Learning this is quite a bit of work because you need to work with meshing, boundary conditions, etc. But I would be very surprised you really want flow visualisation.

For loads: XFOIL or AVL (Athena Vortex Lattice, http://web.mit.edu/drela/Public/web/avl/). AVL allows 3D visualisation of loads, perturbations, etc. When it comes to a first iteration in aeroplane design this is first thing we use in academia and is quite nice. XFOIL is 2D and is used for analysis on an aerofoil. Both allow arbitrary geometries, but I believe both are strictly for inviscid flows.

What theories in particular are you trying to validate?

Archos 9 (http://www.archos.com/products/nb/archos_9/index.html?country=us&lang=en) ships with Windows 7, the older Archos 7 and Archos 5 shipped with Angstrom Linux and they even release the source code.

It is probably MATLAB linked with Astrogator/STK.

MATLAB has the standard integrators, plus it has a decent optimisation toolbox and STK allows for neat visualisations.

It looks like a radial Von Karman Vortex Street, typically seen for low Reynolds numbers for flow over a cylinder. To me it like a Lorentz transformation similar to electrical current going in circles creating a magnet, and vice versa.

No, the plural is millennia.

My degrees are not in paleontology, but let me educate you on how this works:

Undergraduate student/intern finds/makes something, gives to professor. Professor is collaborating with professor at another university. Professor at another university gives a graduate student some work. The student does all the leg work, finds an anomaly, reports to his professor who reports back to original professor. Because of an arrangement, the place of origin of the specimen is given publication priority.

Chances are the lead author is the highest in the food chain.