So, today is Asteroid Day! Perhaps it’s me, but there is a sort of menacing feeling when you talk to people about asteroids. The pertinent question seems to be: Will they get us the way they got the dinosaurs? You know the sort of thing. And of course it is natural to worry about such…
The NASA Dawn spacecraft is now in its low altitude mapping orbit (LAMO) 210 km above the surface of the asteroid 4 Vesta (image: NASA). The NASA Dawn mission continues to send back breathtaking images of the asteroid 4 Vesta, which it has been studying in detail since July 2011. In mid-December the spacecraft successfully…
Image of Vesta’s south polar region showing large central peak that rises 22km above the surrounding terrain (vertical scale 1.5 x horizontal). (image: NASA) As the NASA Dawn spacecraft continues its study of the asteroid Vesta the images being released have become increasingly detailed and breathtaking. It is true that the huge southern crater, with…
The Space Shuttle Atlantis lands for the final time at the Kennedy Space Centre, 5.57am EDT on July 21, 2011 (image: NASA) Thirty years of Space Shuttle flights came to an end earlier this month with the safe landing of Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Centre on July 21. The event was widely covered in…
Meteorites: The Blog from the Final Frontier 