I couldn’t believe it when I read the story this morning. The Beagle 2 probe has been found, and partially intact even. It’s been more than eleven years since the 2003 Christmas day launch of Beagle 2 by the European Space Agency, presumed lost forever after months of attempts at establishing communication. Many scientists had assumed that Beagle 2 had smashed into Mars at high-velocity, destroying it completely, but photos from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) clearly show the lander made it to the ground safely. The issue seems to be that the Beagle’s deployable ‘petals’ did not unfurl completely. The...
The Astronaut recently came back down to Earth after a standard 6 month stay on the International Space Station. This incredible footage of Earth really puts things into perspective.
For the first time in human history we are landing on a Comet! Watch the live feed and you can follow the landing as it’s happening. It is expected to touch down at about 11:03 EST. The lander, named Philae, already detached from the Rosetta Spacecraft at about 4am EST, and is slowly moving toward the landing site. Once it gets close enough it will launch harpoons (yup you read it right) to grab onto the comet and pull itself down to the surface, snapping photos along the way. The Science communication world has been following this story since the Orbiter arrived...
Launched in December of 2013, the European Space Agency (ESA)’s GAIA Mission will be the next great mission to find exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our own Sun. However, GAIA’s main mission is not to search for planets, but to look at the motion, physical characteristics, and distance of up to one Billion stars with incredible precision. It’s a given that the satellite will invariably find planets by seeing the ‘wobble’ of a star due to the gravity of a planetary system. One of the strengths that GAIA posesses over other exoplanet studies is that it will search a...
It’s true, Mars just had what we call a Meteor Storm. This is an event that, on Earth, only happens once every few hundred years, and the one that Mars just had was more intense than anything Earth has experienced in recorded history. This event happened because of a close Martian fly-by of comet C/2013 A1 Sliding Spring. On October 19th around 2:30pm EDT the comet came within 140,000 Km of Mars. This is incredibly close in Astronomical terms, being less than half the distance to the Moon and comparable to the total distance I’ve driven my car in the...
Okay so 100 million years seems like a big mistake on the part of Astronomers, but in the astronomical community its a small adjustment. Today the most detailed map of the CMBR ever captured was released by the Planck telescope group at the ESA. Based on 15.5 months of data, it shows the tiny temperature variations that were present when the universe had a temperature of 2700 degrees Celsius and an age of just 380,000 years (trust me that’s small on astronomical scales). This is the point when the dense soup of protons and electrons formed hydrogen atoms, and the universe became transparent. As...
