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Rosetta Flyby By Asteroid Lutetia
The ESA spacecraft Rosetta is about 200,000km away from the asteroid Lutetia right now. In a few hours, it will be flying past at a distance of just 3,000km at an amazing 54,000km per hour - that's 15km every second. Already the powerful OSIRIS cameras are starting to make out surface features of the 100km wide asteroid, and both Orbiter and Lander ( Read more... ) -
Aurora Borealis
It's been a very busy time since my last post, both in my personal life and in the space industry - the Japanese have been having some particularly exciting successes I've been meaning to write about, and the launch of SpaceX's Falcon has quite amazing implications, but I haven't gotten around to any writing about any of this ( Read more... ) -
Comets, comets, everywhere
Comets have been known to man since ancient times (at least since Aristotle, around 350BC) and we are currently aware of the existence of some three and a half thousand of them, yet they remain the most elusive and least understood bodies in our solar system.
Almost half of the comets we know about today are what we call Kreutz Sungrazers believed ( Read more... ) -
The Heavenly Palace
I confess I had somehow completely overlooked the name given to the intended future Chinese space station: "Tiangong" translates as "The Heavenly Palace" and to my mind it's the best name given to anything launched by man. I hope it goes well, though I wish they'd be a little bit less secretive about it all ( Read more... ) -
With apologies to Edgar Allan Poe
Once upon a lunchtime dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious website of lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a rapping,
As of someone gently tapping, tapping at my keyboard.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tweeting at my last post -
Only this, and nothing more.'
UK National Poetry DayOk, ok, ( Read more... ) -
Ig Nobel Prizes
I'm a bit confused with the Ig Nobel prizes, I thought their whole purpose was to highlight valuable research which seems a bit silly at first thought. For example, this year's Biology winner demonstrated that "kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the faeces of giant pandas" which strikes me as being ( Read more... ) -
What the hell happened in 1990?
When my last laptop died from sudden HD failure, I found myself regretting thinking that owning a big stack of CD's was just as good as a backup of my collection. Basically, I was just being lazy ( Read more... ) -
Ding ding, round 96576
I'm currently eagerly awaiting a rant from cuprohastes about the latest iPhone news.
Security experts claim to have discovered a serious flaw that allows hackers to hijack the iPhone via text messages.
Time for some popcorn... -
The folding (British) Plug
Shamelessly yoinked from rmarsden because if anything deserves to go viral, this does.
For somebody who travels around with as many chargers etc as me, this would be a godsend. Many is the time I've been packing and rued the bulkiness of the UK chargers (or Euro-UK converters) compared to the European equivalents, and this would solidly reverse the ( Read more... ) -
Prague
I have just turned thirty, and decided to mark the occasion by spending a week in Prague accompanied by some of the urchins I've come to refer to as friends over the past 3 decades. Apparently, my timing sucks ( Read more... )
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