Cav's Place

The Martian winter solstice was over two weeks ago, yet NASA hasn’t provided any updates about the rovers since, even though those updates should be weekly. Sure, there wouldn’t be much to say about Opportunity, who likely performed nothing other than a couple more short drives, and nothing at all about Spirit, who has been […]

In a press release that seems to have pretty much been meant to fly under the radar, NASA admits its failure in the attempt to free Spirit from the sand trap she drove into last (Earth) spring, despite the encouraging results of their latest strategy, because Martian winter is quickly approaching and the amount of […]

The year starts with good news from other worlds. And I mean that quite literally, since the first new planets discovered by the Kepler Mission were announced yesterday. (Kepler 4b to Kepler 8b are the new discoveries. The other three planets were already known to exist in Kepler’s field of view.) The list doesn’t seem […]

NASA crashed a lunar satellite under controlled conditions in an attempt to determine whether the Moon holds water ice. Many seem quite excited about the possibility and one has to admit that proving that water exists on the Moon is exciting from a purely scientific point of view, but otherwise I don’t exactly see what […]

With the first science data downlink from the Kepler Mission supposed to be happening just these days, I thought I’d take a minute to put all the apparently uninteresting things we know about exoplanets into perspective. According to The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, we are currently aware of 353 exoplanets and most of them are lonely […]