Starship Asterisk*

There is an article about this here in today's issue of the periodical ABC published in Madrid It is of course in Spanish, but presumably Google Translate can be of assistance to those who need it! http://www.abc.es/Media/201412/29/trayectoria-bolido--478x350.jpg Trayectoria del bólido rozador sobre...

It never ceases to make me catch my breath when I remind myself that these exquisite and detailed images are from another planet.
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There is a talk here by Dr Claudia Alexander to the Bay Area SETI Institute, seemingly whilst she was in San Francisco for the AGU conference. (She is NASA's rep on the Rosetta mission.) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kW4t-8v13aQ Rosetta: Wild Bounce at comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko - Claudia Alexander...

She's on holiday vacation. Saw her post on Twitter pleading with her email inbox to stop filling up during it. :) Thanks for the info. I was thinking of asking about her on unmannedspaceflight. It was a bit confusing when she wrote Reporting from the 2014 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Un...

THANKYOU, BYSTANDER

I haven't seen any of these!
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Chang’e-3 lander continues work after finishing scheduled tasks 2014-12-15 14:39 Ecns.cn Web Editor: Mo Hong'e (ECNS) -- The Chang'e-3 lander has finished all scheduled tasks in 13 lunar days and 13 lunar nights since its soft landing one year ago and will continue to carry out additional tasks, th...

News from the AGU meeting is covered in this Nature news article http://www.nature.com/news/comet-lander-s-location-still-eludes-scientists-1.16576?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20141223 . It mostly covers the search for Philae but also mentions some of the OSIRIS photos that were shown, but not made available publ...

An "Authors' version" of this Nature article has been posted on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.5368 It is to be discussed in this astrobite : http://astrobites.org/2014/12/21/the-curious-case-of-a-simple-star-cluster-with-an-extended-main-sequence/ by Suk Sien Tie Background Classes ...

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/files/2014/12/Card_EN_small.jpeg from the ESA Rosetta blog team And from Margarita PS The blog says A short note from the blog team here at ESA: after an amazing but exhausting year, we're going to take a year-end break between Monday, 22 December 2014 and Monday, 5 Jan...

Jim Kaler writes : The next Skylights will appear Friday, January 2, 2015. Thanks for your patience. Best wishes for a merry and happy holiday season STARS OF THE WEEK: CHI AND PSI PEG (Chi and Psi Pegasi), another two-for-one special. And this one is a natural for its rather remarkable symmetries. ...

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

FM14 Rosetta comet science results PressConference

American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Published on 17 Dec 2014

ESA blog 18 December 2014 - updates from AGU

My initial confusion was clarified once I realised that this is talking about globular clusters, not open clusters.

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Thank you for posting that, bystander. For some reason the Doodles often don't show up on the Google home page when I access it from here. I once wrote a long (double) essay on the art of Kandinsky when I was an undergraduate. I put SO MUCH love and hard work into it... and was desolate when my tuto...

Lunar Mission One fundraising site Just now: 6,760 backers £615,967 pledged of £600,000 27 hours to go NBC:Lunar Mission One Hits First Kickstarter Goal for Moon Shot Lunar Mission One's crowdfunding campaign has met its initial £600,000 ($945,000) target for a privately funded robotic mission to t...

ESA: Venus Express goes gently into the night http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2014/05/venus_express_aerobraking2/14528158-1-eng-GB/Venus_Express_aerobraking_large.jpg Visualisation of the Venus Express aerobraking manoeuvre 16 December 2014 ESA’s Venus Express has en...

Today's astrobite treats of this paper in
Flying Free: A Supermassive Black Hole Kicked Out Of Its Galaxy


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Planetary Society blog: NASA's 2015 Budget Increase is All But Confirmed Senate passes the CRomnibus spending bill with $18.01 billion NASA budget Posted by Casey Dreier 2014/12/14 07:13 UTC ...The bill now goes to President Obama, who has stated his intention to sign the legislation. The omnibus w...

There are three lovely new images from Adam Block in this Planetary Society guest blog:
Pretty pictures of the Cosmos: Strange and spooky
Posted By Adam Block 2014/12/12 16:25 UTC

I'm not attempting to hot link.

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BBC: Europe to press ahead with Ariane 6 rocket Research ministers have approved the development of a new rocket for Europe. The Ariane 6 will succeed the Ariane 5, which, although highly successful, is now facing stiff competition on price. The politicians believe industry will find the new vehicl...

ESA Rosetta blog: ROSETTA SCIENCE TO BE PRESENTED AT AGU Some of the first scientific results from the Rosetta mission after its arrival at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 6 August and since the landing of Philae on 12 November will be presented to the scientific community next week, during the ...

I found the following a helpful review.. http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.2852 New emission line at ~3.5 keV - observational status, connection with radiatively decaying dark matter and directions for future studies Dmytro Iakubovskyi. ( Submitted on 10 Oct 2014 (v1), last revised 12 Nov 2014 (this version...

ESA: Rosetta fuels debate on origin of Earth's oceans 10 December 2014 ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has found the water vapour from its target comet to be significantly different to that found on Earth. The discovery fuels the debate on the origin of our planet’s oceans. The measurements were made in t...

Send your computer code into space with astronaut Tim Peake Leading UK space organisations have joined forces with British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake and Raspberry Pi to offer students a chance to devise and code their own apps or experiment to run in space. Two Raspberry Pi computers are planned to b...

NASA:On Pluto’s Doorstep, NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Awakens for Encounter After a voyage of nearly nine years and three billion miles —the farthest any space mission has ever traveled to reach its primary target – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft came out of hibernation today for its long-awaite...