Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
On its Way to a Comet, Spacecraft Checks Out an Asteroid The Rosetta orbiter, which carries the lander Philae, has completed more than two thirds of its journey to the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The most comprehensive cometary investigation ever, the mission will deliver the Philae lander to the comet’s surface for in situ studies. On their way to the comet, the spacecraft and lander are [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Voyager 2 Completes 12,000 Days of Continuous Operations; New “Cosmic Café” Opens on Mt. Wilson On June 28, 2010, Voyager 2 completed 12,000 days of continuous operations since its launch on August 20, 1977. For nearly 33 years, the venerable spacecraft has been returning unprecedented data about the giant outer planets, the properties of the solar wind between and beyond the planets [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
U.S. High-School Students Help Space Scientists Recover Spacecraft in Australia: For millions of American high-school students, early June means long hours studying for final exams. But for three lucky teenagers, getting a passing grade in their astronomy class meant traveling halfway around the world—from Massachusetts to the Australian Outback—to work side-by-side with a NASA-led [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Texas State Astronomers Solve Walt Whitman Meteor Mystery In his landmark collection Leaves of Grass, famed poet Walt Whitman wrote of a “strange huge meteor-procession dazzling and clear shooting over our heads…” For decades, scholars have debated what astronomical event he was referring to. Now, a team of astronomers from Texas State University has applied its unique brand of [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Astronomy from an Airplane? A New Way of Looking Up Can you imagine a telescope the size of Mount Wilson Observatory’s 100-inch, doing astronomy from a Boeing 747 jetliner? It happened on May 26, when the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a joint program by NASA and the German Aerospace Center, made its first in-flight night observations. “With this flight, [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Phoenix Mars Lander Does Not Phone Home NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has ended operations after repeated attempts to contact the spacecraft were unsuccessful. A new image transmitted by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), looking down on Phoenix from orbital height, shows signs of severe ice damage to the lander’s solar panels. “The Phoenix spacecraft succeeded in its [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Arc to Arcturus OF THE 2,000 OR SO STARS that are visible to the unaided eye (or would be, in a dark sky far from city lights), only a relative few are known by name. The brightest ones have names given to them many centuries ago, mostly by Greek, Babylonian, Roman, or Arab starwatchers—names full of history and lore, like Arcturus (Greek for “bear-guard”), Betelgeuse (Babylonian for [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Setting Sail for the Stars - The spring winds gusting across the Southland today almost had me grumbling about wind chill and such—but instead, the wind-pressure at my back suddenly brought a flood of pleasant recollections of my sail-skating days as a college student. The University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I was attending the fall-winter term, is built on the shore of beautiful [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
NASA’s New Eye on the Sun Delivers Stunning First Images NASA’s recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our Sun’s dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth. Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material [...]
Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Long-Lost Soviet Reflector Found on Moon A team of physicists led by a professor at UC San Diego has pinpointed the location of a long-lost light reflector left on the lunar surface by the Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago that many scientists had unsuccessfully searched for and never expected would be found. The French-built laser reflector was sent aboard the unmanned Luna 17 mission, [...]
