Farewell, Cassini – the Little Spacecraft That Could.
space program
Spacecraft exploring the Solar system
Last week’s news of plans to clear up humanity’s space-junk, aka orbital debris, currently cluttering up Low Earth Orbit, alarmed quite a few folks. In better space news, the many non-junk bits and bobs we’ve got floating around up there are busy gathering data so that we can learn more about our planetary and stellar neighbours.
ObFreeFallSpaceJump post: a little detail I was glad to discover
Because I obviously haven’t been paying enough attention, I hadn’t realised that Joseph Kittinger, the USAF officer who previously held the record for highest/fastest freefall parachute jump after the 1959-60 Project Excelsior research into high-altitude bailouts, was part of the team for Felix Baumgartner’s successful attempt on those records.
It’s been a sad few months for space fans
NASA’s astronaut corps is losing its pioneers. First Sally Ride died in July, now Neil Armstrong has died as well. Of course the celebration for the success of the new Mars Rover mission has been a huge boost for astro… Read More ›
New Mars rover Curiosity landing today
Today the Mars Science Laboratory mission finds out whether they made all the calculations correctly as the delivery vehicle targets Gale Crater for Curiosity’s landing. Landing should be at 15:31 AEST.
A little dose of Awesome: Lego in Space!
Canadian high school students Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad have launched a Lego man almost 25 kilometres above sea level – high enough to capture video of the plastic toy hovering above the curvature of the Earth.
Farewell to the Space Shuttle
Just watched Endeavour‘s last landing at the Kennedy Space Center. For a little while, you can still see it sitting on the runway going through its final postflight checks, via this livestream.
Femmostroppo Reader January 29, 2011
Items of interest come across recently in my feed-reader. What did I miss? Leave your own interesting links in comments.