This is in 1/210,100th of the sky
With the Hubble Legacy Field, what it doesn’t capture is as remarkable as what it does.
GEDI is on the ISS (“May the forest be with it”)
I’m a little late on this (thanks to Eric Desfonds of Excelitas for the reminder this morning), but GEDI launched on Wednesday, Dec. 5, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket. It’s being integrated on the International Space Station as I type...
A Late-Breaking Review
I was hanging out at the YMCA of the Rockies Estes Park craft center a couple of weeks back, scrolling through emails as my daughters glued colorful glass shards to pale pine cigarette boxes, when an email came in. Subject line: A review of Jars...
Pluto Man
You may have heard: NASA has a mission flying past Pluto tomorrow. New Horizons. The thing’s been in space for nine-and-a-half years. I was there at the launch, covering it for the Boulder Daily Camera. Wrote probably 15 stories about the...
What’s the use of math? – a JWST example
My 12-year-old daughter, as 12-year-old daughters do, asked me what’s the use of math. I wrote a book about space engineers. Their work is the manifestation of math. I have taken to answering with something along the lines of “math...
From Jars to Stars to… Mars @Slate.com
A closely held secret among journalists is that, once you write a story, the mind tends to shed the details rather hastily. And so, despite seeming authoritative — and actually being rather authoritative — for the duration of a given...
Second-ever comet landing happens today
Humanity’s second-ever comet landing happens today when the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft (technically, the Philae lander) touches down on the comet Churumov-Gerasimenko at 16:00 UTC, or 11 a.m. Eastern, 7 a.m. Pacific to you...
Yes, NewSpace will recover in the wake of tragedy
It’s only been a couple of hours since Virgin Galactic lost its SpaceShipTwo spacecraft. The names of the pilots — one dead, one clinging to life — have yet to be released. I got the initial word via Twitter, a retweet...
Compliance, COSTAR, a dead teenager named Neff, and the Gettysburg Address
After finishing up my moderating duties at Compliance Week 2014, I put on my running stuff and headed to the National Mall, destination National Air and Space Museum. The aim was to see something very specific, an instrument brought back from the...
Good news: Mars was once habitable. Bad news: it will kill you now.
NASA sent out a press release with two Mars-related news items yesterday. Whether this was an attempt to bury the bad news, you decide. First, the good news: An erstwhile freshwater lake in what’s now Gale Crater, whose rocks the Curiosity...
Deep Impact Goes Dark
The small team still running Deep Impact, in orbit for going on nine years, on Aug. 8 lost touch with the spacecraft. Deep Impact smacked the comet Tempel 1 on Independence Day 2005 and went on to swing by a second comet, Hartley 2, and then hunt...
Kepler, 2009-2013
The most important spacecraft since the Hubble Space Telescope has been felled by a couple of reaction wheels that stubbornly held to their predicted useful lives, NASA reports. Something about Kepler, despite its stubborn refusal to return...