Tag Archives: ESA

Off to Mars. Yes and no.

It hasn’t escaped notice that the Russians (with a Chinese probe) tried sending a mission to Mars, Fobos-Grunt-Yinghuo, which spluttered into low Earth orbit and presumably will fall back to Earth. Meanwhile, NASA the U.S. space agency lofted another Mars mission, MSL Curiosity, that is happily on its way to the Red Planet. If this [...]
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Mars 500: The simulation ends

The Mars 500 facility, in a parking lot….Credit: ESA, Wikimedia Commons It was, as so many jokingly put it, a real down-to-earth mission to Mars. As in, the mission never left Earth. Beginning June 3, 2010 and ending November 4, 2011, the Mars 500 mission took place in a facility at the Russian Academy of [...]
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Two Notable Space Successes

Concerning space missions, there’s always something happening in space. Most of it is ‘routine’ in the sense that what happens was expected and a normal part of the mission. Re-supply of the International Space Station generally falls into that category (except a couple of weeks ago when the resupply vehicle missed the station on the [...]
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Loricifera: Larger life without oxygen

Loricifera [drawing, NASA] Meet the loricifera. It’s not a neighbor; living 10,000 feet down in the muck at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s not a relative, not even close, in fact, it doesn’t use oxygen. That in itself is not unusual for bacteria or viruses, but loricifera is neither bacteria nor virus. It [...]
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Exploiting suborbital space

The commercial ‘exploitation’ of space has been developing for more than a decade. By exploitation I mean simply ‘making a profit’ from it. Lofting satellites into orbit was once the purview of governments. In fact, rockets into any level of space were usually government projects (and mostly military). That began changing a decade or two [...]
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It’s big, it’s temperate; it’s a normal planet: CoRoT-9b

To-date a little more than 400 planets outside of our Solar System have been discovered. A new planet has just been added to the list, CoRoT-9b, and it’s special. It’s a big planet, a gas giant like Jupiter and Saturn. However, its orbit is close to the star (unlike Jupiter and Saturn) so it has [...]
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Russians plan asteroid diversion

Nazdrovia! Nothing like starting off 2010 with a little talk of Armageddon (the movie). Rumors were flying around the Internet just before the New Year that the Russians are planning a mission to divert the asteroid 99942 Apophis away from Earth collision.
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