Cav's Place

Ten years and nearly nine months since launch, four years and nearly a month and a half since orbital insertion, the highly successful MESSENGER mission has come to an end, the spacecraft impacting the surface of Mercury at 3.91 km/s. At that point of the orbit, the spacecraft was on the far side of Mercury, […]

Today marks 25 years since the Hubble Space Telescope, arguably our best eye in the sky, was launched. Whether it’ll still be operational for its 30th anniversary is unknown at the moment, especially since it can’t be serviced anymore after the United States gave up on the space shuttles without having any sort of replacement […]

As you probably know, three astronomical events took place today, namely a solar eclipse, a so-called “supermoon” and the equinox. If you want to be very specific, however, it must be said that, while March 20 meets the definition of a “supermoon”, namely the full or new Moon being within 90% of its closest approach […]

Confirmation was received at 1:36 PM GMT, which means that, as of about four hours ago, we know that Dawn entered orbit around Ceres, becoming both the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet, ahead of New Horizons‘ flyby of Pluto, scheduled to take place in July, and the first spacecraft to orbit two different […]

Last night, at 2:53 AM GMT, the signal confirming that New Horizons has come out of hibernation for the final time before its Pluto encounter was received. Of course, in itself that wasn’t a major event and there was little cause for concern, seeing as the spacecraft has spent most of the time since its […]