Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the way to the launch of Vostok 1 0n 12 April 1961. Gagarin’s flight lasted just under two hours and he made one orbit of the Earth. (Image: NASA) Well, here we are at the start of 2011. While it looks like being a fairly tough year, there is still plenty…
View of the Moon’s eastern limb and far side taken by Apollo 16 (Image: NASA) It’s now over 40 years since the first lunar samples were returned by Apollo 11. Almost immediately after their arrival on Earth these precious materials were subjected to an unprecedented level of scientific scrutiny. By all accounts the first Lunar…
Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene A. Cernan driving the Lunar Roving Vehicle (Image: NASA) Back in 1968, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band released their greatest hit: I’m The Urban Spaceman. Having detailed what a cool guy he was, the final line of the song delivers this sting in the tail: “I’m the urban spaceman, baby; here…
The asteroid Itokawa from which the Hayabusa spacecraft has successfully returned sample material to Earth (Image: JAXA) As you may remember, a couple of weeks back, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that, after all, the Hayabusa spacecraft had collected extraterrestrial particles from the asteroid Itokawa. This came as a bit of a shock…
Meteorites: The Blog from the Final Frontier 