ESA is launching the Swarm mission later this year to study the Earth’s magnetic field.
ESA’s Swarm Mission
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Category Archives: ESA
Vega Launched
The first flight of ESA’s Vega rocket occurred yesterday.
The payload consisted of two Italian satellites: ASI’s LARES laser relativity satellite and the University of Bologna’s ALMASat-1. Flight VV01 will also carry seven picosatellites provided by European universities: e-St@r (Italy), Goliat (Romania), MaSat-1 (Hungary), PW-Sat (Poland), Robusta (France), UniCubeSat GG (Italy) and Xatcobeo (Spain).
One of Italian satellites aims to put Einstein to the test – this is VERY cool stuff.
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Don’t forget about the Bonus riddle and I’m thinking about having a Second Chance Riddle this Saturday, need to hook up with Marian on this before it’s for sure, but if all goes well.
2012 ESA Missions Preview
A good preview of ESA missions with (IMHO) terrible audio quality. I thought it was just the version I was watching but no, they are all the same.
Audio aside, I can’t wait to see that Vega launch coming right up on February 9, the VV01 as it is called is going to carry nine satellites into orbit including seven CubeSats from European universities.
I love the CubeSats. Typically they are a 10 cm cube, that’s 3.9 inches in the US and they weigh in at about 1.33 kg or 2.9 lbs. They give a platform for students to perform space science experiments and exploration. CubeSats have been built by academia as they utilize off-the-shelf electronics. Several companies have built CubeSats including Boeing, builders of “regular” satellites. CubeSats are very popular and provide a nice fit with the ham radio crowd too, of which I am happy to say I belong.
BTW: I’ve been hearing the aurora was very nice last night, I was clouded in so I can’t say. Hard to believe as the K indices were not that high, it could be the reports were originating in very high latitudes though.
When Suns Die
Good video, took a long time to load, must be my ISP is having problems. Prolly all those Pats fans 
Asteroid Lutetia
Rocks dislodged in a landslide on Lutetia. Click for larger. Credits: ESA 2011 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Cool stuff!!
From the ESA site:
ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has revealed asteroid Lutetia to be a primitive body, left over as the planets were forming in our Solar System. Results from Rosetta’s fleeting flyby also suggest that this mini-world tried to grow a metal heart.
Rosetta flew past Lutetia on 10 July 2010 at a speed of 54 000 km/hr and a closest distance of 3170 km. At the time, the 130 km-long asteroid was the largest encountered by a spacecraft. Since then, scientists have been analysing the data taken during the brief encounter.
Our Twisted Galactic Ring
The twisted ring around the galactic center. Larger versions linked below. Images: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech
If you are having trouble visualizing the ring click the image. You can get larger versions of the images at the link below and I recommend you do so, they are really good.
From the ESA Herschel Space Observatory site (via Caltech).
New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years, were known before. Herschel’s view reveals the entire ring for the first time, and a strange kink that has astronomers scratching their heads.
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