I saw a few great April Fool’s jokes today, but this one at NASA Watch really got the prize: “Pluto is Now Just a Fairly Large Rock” With perfect mock-serious delivery, blog author Keith Cowing reported it like straight news — given the growing number of solar system bodies in Pluto’s neighborhood, the beleaguered little [...]
Pretty newsy science day, for a Saturday! The space shuttle Discovery landed at Kennedy Space Center with much well-deserved fanfare; the astronauts completed a 13-day mission including three space walks and full buildout (all four wings) of the International Space Station. They also brought home Sandra Magnus, who has spent four months in microgravity aboard [...]
NASA’s Kepler mission lifted off without a hitch just before 11 p.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch was a bit of a nail-biter, coming on the heels of last week’s failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which plummeted (all $270 million of it) into the ocean when its casing malfunctioned. But everything [...]
Well, that was about the saddest news briefing I’ve ever seen. At a hastily-arranged press conference, three NASA officials spoke on NASA TV this morning about the failed launch of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite that was supposed to fill in some missing links about the role of human-emitted carbon in climate change. [...]
