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European Space Agency's engineers will use burnt bone charcoal to protect its solar probe from the harsh glare of the Sun.

Burnt bone charcoal, also used in prehistoric cave paintings, will be used by scientists in the titanium heatshield of ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft.

will help in protecting the Orbiter from the strong glare of the Sun

China's state news agency, Xinhua, reported

that the rover

recovered from its previous non-responsive state and is now fully awake and able to receive signals

10th February 2014

some nice signals are detected from the Lunar Lander but nothing from the Lunar Rover - several news outlets report that the Rover has had a failure after its Lunar sleep, and that it was not expected to become alive again

t doesn't hurt to monitor the downlink now and then.

As night fell on Jan. 25, the rover entered its second two week long period of dormancy just as the rover “experienced a mechanical control abnormality,” according to a report by China’s official government newspaper, The People’s Daily.

concerned that it might not be able to survive the extremely low temperatures during the lunar night

Experts wer

In 1947, Edwin H. Land first demonstrated his Polaroid Land camera, the first used self-developing film, at a meeting of the Optical Society of America at the Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City. It produced a black-and-white photograph in 60 seconds, using developer and fixer chemicals sandwiched in pods with the photographic paper and film. After exposure, developing was initiated by turning a knob that squeezed open the pod of chemicals.

Polaroid camera

Glenn in orbit

In 1962, John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first U.S. manned orbital mission. Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed three-orbits around the earth, at a maximum altitude of approx. 162 miles and an orbital velocity of approx. 17,500 mph. He spotted Perth, Australia, when that city's residents greeted him by switching on their house lights in unison. A four-cent U.S. stamp was put on sale the same day, making it the first U.S. stamp issued on the day of the event it commemorated. Glenn returned to space 36 years later, making 134 more orbits as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery (29 Oct - 7 Nov 1998) for investigations on space flight and the aging process.

In 1986, the Soviet Union launched into orbit Mir, a new space station. Mir, the Russian word for peace, had six docking ports and special laboratories for scientific research. Weeks later, a veteran crew was sent to man the 56-ft-long and 13.6-ft wide station. The core module provided living quarters for the cosmonauts: galley/table, cooking elements and storage, individual crew cabins and personal hygiene area. They also had a working compartment for monitoring and commanding the core systems supported by an electric power system, thermal control system, computer systems, environmental control and life support, communications and tracking systems. Five additional modules were launched between Mar 1987 and April 1996

In 1924, Edwin Hubble wrote a letter to Harlow Shapley, which he concluded by saying, “...the distance [to the Andromeda nebula] comes out something over 300,000 parsecs.” Hubble discussed in the letter his measurement of the magnitudes of the Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda nebula he had found and confirmed. He used their measured characteristics to calculate their distance, definitely about a million light years from our Solar System. This was the evidence that Andromeda was a separate galaxy, far beyond the Milky Way. This was the first proof of an “island universe.” After collecting more data, Hubble sent a paper read on 1 Jan 1925 to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Meanwhile, Shapley remained unconvinced, as when he debated Heber Curtis on 26 Apr 1920.

Hubble notifies Shapley of Andromeda distance

In 1630, popcorn was introduced to the English colonists by an Indian named Quadequina who brought it in deerskin bags as his contribution at their first Thanksgiving dinner. Popcorn is a type of corn with smaller kernels than regular corn, and when heated over a flame, it "pops" into the snack we know it as today. Native Americans were growing it for more than a thousand years before the arrival of European explorers. In 1964, scientists digging in southern Mexico found a small cob of popcorn discovered to be 7,000 years old. Today, the United States grows nearly all of the world's popcorn.

Popcorn

A new European spacecraft tasked with mapping a billion stars in the night sky  has beamed its first picture back to Earth.

its first test image

only covers an area less than 1 percent of Gaia's full field of view

A treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada's Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth, scientists say.

The Burgess Shale refers to both a fossil find and a 505-million-year-old rock formation made of mud and clay

Burgess Shale fossil quarry, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in Yoho National Park, is in a glacier-carved cliff in the Canadian Rockies.

The apparently unfortunate and sad breaking news was just reported today in an ultra brief dispatch by the English language version of Chinadaily – with the headline “Loss of lunar rover.”

thought that Yutu froze to death due to a pre-hibernation mechanical malfunction and failed to wake up and communicate with China’s mission controllers

Beijing on Monday, Feb. 10, when daylight returned to the rovers Moon landing site at Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) at the start of what would have been Lunar Day 3 for the mission.