Pluto, we're almost there.

In just shy of two weeks the New Horizons spacecraft will arrive at the dwarf planet Pluto on July 14, 2015.  A mission that spanned nearly a decade; a spacecraft traveling 3 billion miles; will climax in a single day as New Horizons will speed past Pluto at 32,500 MPH.

If all goes well we will see Pluto in detail never before possible.  This is the event of 2015!  And, you might not know, but New Horizons is controlled from right here in Maryland at the Applied Physics Lab.

Lots of details and up-to-the-minute coverage of this historic event can be found at New Horizons.

Bright Spots on Ceres ... and now a Pyramid.

As each new image of Ceres arrives at earth the more perplexing the dwarf planet grows. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has now identified several more bright spots as well as a pyramid-like peak miles high. More details can be found here.

Bad news from the SpaceX folks

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket broke up in a fiery blast on Sunday just minutes after its launch with a robotic Dragon cargo capsule headed for the International Space Station.

Details at NBC News

Faces of Pluto

As the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to its encounter with the dwarf planet Pluto, some fantastic images are starting to stream in from its current location almost 3 billion miles from Earth.
At that distance it takes about 4hrs and 20min for the signal to get to us from the spacecraft.

New Horizons is a little over 18 million miles from Pluto, moving at 8.6 miles per second, or about 31,000 MPH!

These images, taken by New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show four different "faces" of Pluto as it rotates about its axis with a period of 6.4 days. All the images have been rotated to align Pluto's rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down) on the figure, as depicted schematically in the upper left.

New Horizons is just over 25 days and 12 hours to its historic rendezvous with Pluto.
 
For lots of up-to-the-minute information on the mission, check out New Horizons.

Philae wakes up

In a post back in November I wrote about the ESA spacecraft Rosetta and the small spacecraft, Philae, that was to land on a comet. And although it did, there were problems ... it didn't land where it was supposed to and ended up in a ravine with lots of shadows. Soon after, the batteries went dead due to lack of sunlight on the solar panels and contact with Philae was lost.

It was hoped that as the comet got closer to the sun it would recharge and phone home. That occurred at 22:28 CEST (Central European Summer Time) on 13 June!!

Welcome back, Philae !!!!

Details can be found on rosetta blog.