Space

All posts tagged Space

Here Comes the Sun

Posted by gregole on June 16, 2015
Posted in: Travel. Tagged: . 2 Comments

We’ve had a wonderful spring here in Phoenix, Arizona – cool by our standards and it even rained here for the first time in recorded history earlier this month.  But now the sun is back and it is beautiful.  I can’t say I like every single hot day here, but all in all I like the heat.  And I like the sun.

It was rumored, in fact hoped, that the Philae lander might wake up from its slumbers when summer approached.  If you recall, the Philae lander is the first ever probe to make a soft landing on a comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Continue Reading

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DAWN Approaches Ceres

Posted by gregole on March 5, 2015
Posted in: Science. Tagged: . 1 Comment

The DAWN spacecraft, the one with the awesome Ion Thrusters, that has already performed an historical orbiting maneuver around the asteroid Vesta located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is closing in fast on the largest dwarf planet in the asteroid belt:  Ceres.  Back story here:  https://gregole.com/2015/01/27/mission-to-the-asteroid-belt-codename-dawn/

Dawn in LAMO

http://dawnblog.jpl.nasa.gov/2014/08/31/dawn-journal-august-31/

March 6th is the day DAWN will insert itself into orbit around the weird little world that is Ceres – the closer we get, the weirder it looks.  Continue Reading

Dark Matter 2 – Deep Mysteries

Posted by gregole on February 25, 2015
Posted in: Science. Tagged: . Leave a comment

Bullet Cluster

Bullet Cluster: Searching for Primordial Antimatter

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/bullet/

Yesterday’s reblog of The Science Geek (thesciencegeek.org – bookmark this one!)  blog on dark matter, the weird stuff posited to exist otherwise galaxies don’t make sense, and if galaxies don’t make sense, we don’t exist, but we exist so galaxies make sense but they wouldn’t make sense if it weren’t for dark matter…or if it weren’t for something we haven’t considered yet; because there just isn’t enough stuff (matter) in the universe to explain how galaxies actually hold themselves together.  Continue Reading

Happy Birthday Clyde Tombaugh!

Posted by gregole on February 5, 2015
Posted in: Travel. Tagged: . 1 Comment

Clyde W. Tombaugh  www.icollector.com

Clyde Tombaugh was born this day, the fourth of February 1906 in Streator, Illinois and in 1930 discovered the then planet and now dwarf planet Pluto.  And a spacecraft, New Horizons, is hurtling toward Pluto and if all goes well and it should, will make its closest approach something like the fourteenth of July 2015; and when I say hurtling I mean it.  New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral on 01-19-06 atop an Atlas V 551 and holds the record for the fastest object ever launched from earth.

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