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Your 2012 Year in Space Calendar
 

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Archived posts are listed in reverse chronological order.


  • Jan. 31, 2012 | 09:37 PST | 17:37 UTC
    Akatsuki to try for Venus orbit in June 2016
    Date has been corrected to June 2016 (original article had December 2016). And it's no longer clear that there's been a formal decision to enter orbit on that date rather than in 2015 or later. See the notes below. --ESL Japan's Venus climate... More»
  • Jan. 30, 2012 | 12:23 PST | 20:23 UTC
    Dawn Journal: How does Dawn know where "down" is?
    Here's the latest checkup with the Dawn mission, contributed by Marc Rayman, the mission's Project System Engineer. Thanks Marc! --ESLClick to enlarge >Marc RaymanBy Marc Rayman Dear Asdawnished Readers, Dawn is scrutinizing Vesta from its... More»
  • Jan. 29, 2012 | 18:08 PST | Jan. 30 02:08 UTC
    A shooting star is not a star at all
    My kids are watching this right now and I love it every time I hear it so I thought I'd share. They Might Be Giants present "What Is a Shooting Star?" ... More»
  • Jan. 27, 2012 | 14:29 PST | 22:29 UTC
    One Man's Quest for SETI's Most Promising Signal
    Review of Robert H. Gray, The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial intelligence (Chicago: Palmer Square Press, 2011). By Amir Alexander The signal from the stars arrived at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio at 11:16 p.m. on the night... More»
  • Jan. 26, 2012 | 21:43 PST | Jan. 27 05:43 UTC
    Guest Post: Jason Davis: Solar flares from Skylab
    Early on January 23, 2012, our Sun tossed out a powerful, M-class solar flare. M-class eruptions aren't as violent as their X-class siblings, but the accompanying ejection of excited protons was powerful enough to light up our planet's polar regions... More»
  • Jan. 26, 2012 | 20:06 PST | Jan. 27 04:06 UTC
    Today's 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast Offers a Free, Online Astronomy Class!
    By Mat Kaplan The marvelous 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast has begun its fourth year of daily offerings from contributors around the world. The Planetary Society will originate at least 12 podcasts in 2012, each on the last Thursday of the month... More»
  • Jan. 26, 2012 | 14:55 PST | 22:55 UTC
    Parallel planetary processes create semantic headaches
    So here's a semantic problem I ran into today. Consider this photo, a radar image of the Congo river from Envisat.Click to enlarge >Synthetic aperture radar view of the Congo riverThis wide-swath radar image is a mosaic of two images centred over... More»
  • Jan. 25, 2012 | 16:33 PST | Jan. 26 00:33 UTC
    Stephen Hawking's Curios – UPDATE
    by Charlene Anderson The Cosmos Award for Public Presentation of Science – at least the blown-glass Saturn trophy given to Stephen Hawking by The Planetary Society – continues to appear around the Internet. The BBC has now posted a great image from... More»
  • Jan. 25, 2012 | 11:10 PST | 19:10 UTC
    Geek craft: GRAIL twins Ebb and Flow in plastic canvas
    Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that after beginning with Dawn last week, I've kept my fingers busy, stitching more spacecraft from plastic canvas. I now have prototypes for GRAIL, New Horizons, and MESSENGER (though I'm not completely... More»
  • Jan. 24, 2012 | 14:51 PST | 22:51 UTC
    At last: Rosetta's Mars flyby photos have been released!
    On February 24, 2007, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft passed by Mars, the second of four planetary gravity-assist flybys on its long route to a 2014 rendezvous with comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. At the time, they released two photos... More»