There has been much hyperbole recently about the direction NASA is taking under the current administration. The media has presented the decimation of science projects in favour of a new age of exploration - more flags and footprints! Space is viewed myopically as a fighting ground between Science and Exploration. Nothing could be further from […]
An Interruption to Scientific Observations
by the Solar-Physics X-ray Satellite, “Yohkoh”
18 December 2001
Institute of Space & Astronautical Science (ISAS), Japan
Yohkoh, a solar X-ray satellite of ISAS, was launched on 30 August
1991 and has been observing the solar corona and solar flares for
more than ten years. Data obtained from a total of four scientific
instruments, including an X-ray […]
Image is a satellite that stopped sending images on December 18th 2005. Like many satellites in its situation, it was easy to be philosophical about this and say that the project was never expected to have lasted this long anyway.
After all attempts at recovery lead nowhere, an amount of time passed after which it became […]
I was intrigued to know what it would be like to dream of outer space. Last night, in my dream, I was invited to go into space as part of my residency at the Space Science Lab. It was incredibly nice to be asked, but paralysing. I couldn’t put myself through the thought process of […]
Terriers was a mid-sized satellite launched by students at Boston University. Launch was fine, but as it reached orbit, the satellite appeared to be pointing in the opposite direction to the sun meaning the solar array was in shadow. Gradually it emerged that a sine had been entered as -1 instead of +1 and this […]
Sputnik were the first spacecraft that orbited earth and as such they can hold a very special place in people’s memory. Sputnik was about ballistic missiles, bullying, science, experience and the human voice. It may be that all human voices from space have been recorded.
Mariner are the spacecraft that went on voyages alone around the […]
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