by David Todd | May 1, 2015 | exploration, NASA, Satellites, Science, Seradata News
NASA’s MESSENGER (MErcury Surface Space ENvironment GEochemistry Ranging) mission has come to a crunching end with the crash landing of the craft onto the planet Mercury at around 2000 GMT on 30 April 2015. The mission, which was built by the Johns Hopkins...
by David Todd | Apr 10, 2015 | ESA, exploration, Satellites, Science, Seradata News
During a 14km flyby of the nucleus of Comet 67P/Churyumov Gerasimenko on 28 March 2015, the valiant ROSETTA spacecraft of the European Space Agency had a major pointing error. As the comet gets closer to the Sun, it is outgassing water vapour and dust, and this was...
by David Todd | Mar 27, 2015 | exploration, NASA, Satellites, Science, Seradata News
The concept of NASA astronauts exploring and surveying a “proper” asteroid has become an even more distant prospect after NASA toned down its plan to capture small asteroid in a “bag” and try and grab an asteroid boulder instead. The original...
by David Todd | Mar 12, 2015 | exploration, NASA, Satellites, Science
At 1239 GMT on 6 March 2015, the NASA spacecraft Dawn entered orbit around the asteroid/dwarf planet Ceres at 61,000 km altitude. Dawn was launched in 2007 and has used electric propulsion to visit the asteroid Vesta for an orbital stay of 14 months in...
by David Todd | Mar 11, 2015 | exploration, NASA
The BBC has reported that the Excalibur Almaz company has removed its unused Soviet-era Almaz space station module and capsule from its Jurby hangar on the island to an “undisclosed location”. This has been taken by observers as a sign that the project to...
by David Todd | Jan 16, 2015 | ESA, exploration, Science, Technology
While there were recriminations and bitterness following the “landing failure” of the UK’s first space probe to Mars on Christmas day in December 2003, Beagle 2’s originator and planetary scientist, the late Professor Colin Pillinger, who died...
