You’d think I would have learned my lesson by now. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, that I’ve seen every strange phenomenon in space, every unique planet, moon, star, galaxy, every variation, I’m proven wrong. I expect that the order has been established and everything newly discovered will fall into a category with no more unique variation. But here we are again. The close up view of Pan. Pan was photographed only a few days ago by the Cassini spacecraft as it carries out the final months of it’s mission to Saturn. It was revealed to be a...
This is a story that not many know, about a Russian cosmonaut named Vladimir Komarov. He was one of the first Soviet cosmonauts in the 1960s during the cold war space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was the first cosmonaut to fly on more than one space mission, and he sadly became the first human being to die due to space flight. An Aerospace Engineer and test pilot, he was one of the few exceptional candidates accepted into Air Force Group One, the original Soviet cosmonaut program. He wasn’t medically fit for the program on...
Okay so even though it is technically the first ever Earth-borne object to ever touch the surface of Mercury, it isn’t as hopeful as one might expect from the planet’s best and brightest scientists. But in all fairness we have crash landed on Mars, the Moon, and into the clouds of Jupiter, so it’s not uncommon. The Messenger spacecraft has been in space since 2004, orbiting the Sun multiple times in order to arrive at Mercury in 2008. Since then it has completed 4,103 orbits and obtained an incredible amount of scientific data as the first ever space probe to...
