Cav's Place

Yesterday’s announcement confirmed what is by far Kepler‘s best discovery to date: Kepler-62f. The release also mentions six more planets in the two announced systems, and while Kepler-62b, c and d, as well as Kepler-69b, are in very tight orbits and therefore scorched by their stars, Kepler-62e and 69c are also in their stars’ habitable […]

As anyone who’s interested would already know by now, Curiosity has successfully landed on Mars. What’s more, during those first few minutes after touchdown, when it could use Mars Odyssey to relay the data to Earth, it has even sent a couple of small pictures (first, second), showing its shadow and the terrain just around […]

On July 21, 1969, at 2:56 AM GMT, the first human stepped on the Moon, broadcasting for all to see because nobody’d have believed it otherwise. Of course, many still refuse to believe it, preferring various conspiracy theories that may sound somewhat plausible if you don’t put them to the test, but even the Mythbusters […]

In just a few hours, starting at 10:09 PM GMT, we’ll be able to witness one of the rarest cyclical and predictable astronomical events, namely a transit of Venus. Yes, they come in pairs that are eight years apart, so there was another one in 2004, but these pairs are separated by 105 and a […]

With the launch of two very ambitious missions, this month should have been incredibly exciting for the future of Mars exploration. Unfortunately, while Curiosity started its journey without problems, Phobos-Grunt failed to do so and is now very likely to fall back to Earth. Even worse, its fuel tanks are filled with several tons of […]