The Deep Space Climate Observatory (DISCOVR) was launched back in February of this year. Although its goal is to measure solar wind particles from the Sun as a space weather predictor, DISCOVR passes the orbit plane of the Earth and the Moon twice per year. In its first pass, it snapped an amazing series of frames of the Moon passing in front of the Earth. The images show the dark side of the Moon, as well as the stark contrast between the darker lunar surface and the bright Earth. The camera that took the shots, the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera...
Today is a busy day in the world of astronomy and space news. The US Air Force has approved SpaceX for military launches, ending a ten year monopoly by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. A black hole jet moving at nearly the speed of light is having traffic issues, resulting in knots of jet material rear-ending each other. An experiment in Quantum Mechanics has shown that reality simply doesn’t exist until we measure it. Finally, the Gemini planet imager has found a bright, disk-shaped ring of dust around the star HD 115600, which is being likened to the Kuiper Belt in the...
A newsworthy story yesterday was the delay of the launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVER) satellite, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, in a joint collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, and the Us Air Force. The launch was originally scheduled for Sunday just after 6pm EST, and had what we call an ‘instantaneous’ launch window, which means that if the craft didn’t launch on time, it would be scrubbed and launched another day. This is due to the fact that the craft is being sent to the L1 Lagrange point, a point in...
