Cav's Place

Last night, at 0:36 GMT, contact with Philae was lost, as the lander’s non-rechargeable battery drained and it entered hibernation. Considering the very low amount of sunlight available in the location it eventually ended up in at the end of the two jumps it made after first touching down on the surface, the odds of […]

Though the active descent system failed, Philae has successfully landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. So, though the future of space exploration looks grim, today we have some reason to celebrate. Today, for the first time, humanity has a probe operating on the surface of a comet. Granted, I’m not sure such a project would have been […]

It was announced yesterday that Opportunity holds the off-Earth roving distance record after all, the total odometry reaching 40.25 kilometers on July 27. In fact, the little rover became the holder of that record on or around April 19, when it passed 39 kilometers, but it appears that the distance traveled by Lunokhod 2 was […]

Let me start with the good news, which is that Opportunity‘s solar panels were at one point even cleaner than when I last wrote about this, the dust factor reported on May 13 being 0.964, meaning that the dust still gathered on the solar panels blocked only 3.6% of sunlight from reaching them. That value […]

Since it’s Sunday and I’m still waiting for another update about Opportunity to be posted, I guess I could mention that tomorrow Cassini will celebrate ten years of exploring Saturn and its system of moons and rings. During this time, it returned a huge amount of useful data and generated thousands of scientific reports, and […]