Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
2018 has been a record-shattering year -with more than 100 successful launches and mission achievements. What are we looking for in 2019? Another year that promises to be spectacular, as a matter of fact. It started with a bang, with…
Read more
If you missed this news, read it again: it’s not a scam and it’s impressive in its own right. We’re going to have another “moon” (or moons, intended as satellites) out there, and it is going to address, and possibly…
Read more
In case you haven’t heard the news, that’s the story of the day: Soyuz, the Russian vector that since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 has been tasked with taking astronauts back and forth from the ISS, malfunctioned….
Read more
After ESA-Rosetta managed the incredible Phila landing on a comet in 2014, these days are full of photos and news of the amazing achievement of the Hayabusa 2. On 21 September, the Japanese probe successfully released two robotic rovers on the surface…
Read more
Are you excited? You should. There is a total lunar eclipse coming up just in two weeks -on July 27, to be precise – which is going to be the longest of the century and the first central lunar eclipse…
Read more
In the past, I’ve often featured a few amazing snapshots taken from Hubble, Chandra and the various space probes on this blog. It has been a while since I had not posted anything new, so here you have something to…
Read more
Everybody remembers New Horizons, right? The probe, launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in January 2006, did a truly historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015, passing at only 12,472 km (7,750 mi) from the dwarf planet’s icy surface, before continuing its course…
Read more
On paper, this movie checked all my boxes for a good one: it is about space missions (a satellite crash); it is SF horror (even without reading the movie synopsis, I can tell by now just from the onset the…
Read more
I regularly review features about exoplanets, together with giving periodical updates on their number and recent discoveries. Here for the latest stats: The catalogue maintained at Exoplanet.eu gives (April 4, 2018) 3757 planets / 2807 planetary systems / 627 multiple…
Read more
Everybody familiar with SF knows about the habitable zone, at least the basics. It’s that area around a star where life is possible. A look at any astronomy educational site would provide a more detailed and technical definition: “The Circumstellar…
Read more