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the rover passed over the Red Planet dune without difficulty

They also show some interesting veins and mineral fractures are visible in the vicinity just ahead

The Martian dune lies between two low scarps sitting at the north and south ends.

Meteor explosion over Russia with 1,000 injuries

In 2013, a meteor exploded in the sky over Russia's Ural Mountains. It produced a shock wave so intense that about 1,000 people were reported injured, mostly by flying glass fragments. To view the meteor streaking across the sky, many people were at their windows when the sonic boom shattered the glass panes. The meteor was estimated to ;be 2 meters in diameter, with a mass of about 10 tons. It entered the Earth's atmosphere at a hypersonic speed of at least 33,000 mph when it was viewed by residents of Chelyabinsk (a city of 1 million about 930 miles east of Moscow) at about 9:20 am local time, just after sunrise. They saw a thick, white contrail and an intense flash of light ending with a loud thundering sound as the shattering of the meteor blew apart with several kilotons of energy (equivalent to an atomic bomb)

Pluto

In 1930, the planet Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, when comparing two photographic plates taken six days apart the previous month. He found a starry speck that changed position between them. The search for Planet X was started three decades earlier (before Tombaugh was born) at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by Percival Lowell. Deviations in the positions of Uranus and Neptune were suspected to be due to the gravity of an undiscovered ninth planet. Locating it meant sifting through the millions of star images for one dim dot that moved. Lowell was unsuccessful, but in his will decreed that the hunt should continue. Clyde Tombaugh was a Kansas farmboy when Lowell Observatory director Vesto Slipher hired him in 1929. Pluto was the only planet found by an American

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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