Exploration

Dawn over Ceres

Pete Baker on March 8, 2015, 7:16 pm

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On Friday afternoon [GMT], ahead of Ireland cricketers’ epic encounter with Zimbabwe, Nasa’s Dawn spacecraft became the first man-made object to go into orbit around a dwarf planet – Ceres, at 950km across, the largest object in the main asteroid belt. [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA] From the associated text The slim crescent of Ceres smiles back as the dwarf planet awaits the arrival of an emissary from Earth. This image was taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on March 1, 2015, just a few …

Mercury: “A world in and of its own”

Pete Baker on June 19, 2011, 5:08 pm

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In March this year Nasa’s Messenger probe became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. And, as the BBC reports, a few days ago Nasa released the scientific observations and data collected during the first three months of its scheduled year-long mission. In the process a number of hypotheses about the innermost planet were consigned to the “dust bin of science”. Mercury is not like the Moon, nor like the Earth, and it’s not “the burnt-out cinder of the solar system”. [All images …