Cav's Place

Yesterday’s announcement about a potential planet about ten times Earth‘s mass on a highly elongated orbit in the outer regions of the solar system caused quite a stir. However, it’s worth remembering that we’re merely talking about the result of simulations based on what is currently known about the orbits of a number of smaller […]

Following the successful completion of the fourth and final planned trajectory correction maneuver, New Horizons is now truly on its way to its next target, currently named only 2014 MU69. Of course, seeing as the object was only discovered in June of 2014, only an extremely small part of its orbit has been observed, so […]

The break is over, the team took a little well-deserved vacation and also selected the spacecraft’s next destination, and now, as of today, New Horizons can resume transmitting the encounter data. So get ready, because 95% of what it recorded is yet to come and I’m quite sure they gave a higher priority to what […]

Today, at 2:03 AM GMT, comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, or more simply Rosetta‘s comet, reached perihelion, 186 million kilometers from the Sun. The event, which obviously also implies a maximum of activity, was marked by team members attending a two-hour Hangout, which also included some questions and answers about the New Horizons mission, and by the release […]

As everyone should most definitely know, NASA‘s New Horizons spacecraft successfully flew by Pluto on July 14. As such, with Dawn also at Ceres since March, 2015 is the year when humanity first explored not only its first but its first two dwarf planets, or possibly the first three if you consider Charon‘s situation. This […]