Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's most poignant sonnet "Mezzo Cammin" starts:

Half of my life is gone, and I have let
The years slip from me and have not fulfilled
The aspiration of my youth, [...]

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Pow! After a long stretch of uncanny calm the Sun erupted in a violent flurry of activity with a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) on August 1. This belched a stream of solar wind our way, vastly increasing the number of charged particles trapped in the Earth's magnetosphere.

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Ask people what their first thought is when they hear the word "Nigeria" and what will they answer? More likely than not, the first association they make is ye olde "419 Scam", a rip-off that typically starts with an e-mail that should have been deleted unread. For sure not only Nigerian internet criminals use this ploy, but the "Nigeria connection" did originally invent it. Sadly, this is not just the first, but also the only thing many people can think of. But I think Nigeria is worth taking a closer look at and here's why ...
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+++ Update: The entry capsule has landed and shall be retrieved in the course of Monday. The Hayabusa craft dis-integrated in the atmosphere. More here, with pix +++

Talk about a chaotic mission. What could go wrong did go wrong, except for that final crippling damage that would have terminated the mission for good. But I bet nobody would have thought Hayabusa would make it. (More)

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Rhyolite, Nevada, April 1, 2010: Earlier this year a team of astronomers under John Sutter from the American Western Center for Minor body Observations of Nevada (AWCMON) in Rhyolite, Nevada found yet another Earth orbit crossing asteroid.  Nobody took much notice; neither the asteroid's orbit or its size were remarkable. It was given the identification code 2010AU79 and that was that. Back to more important work - or so one thought.

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The German constitutional court, the highest court in the Federal Republic of Germany, on March 9, 2010 refused to accept an appeal filed by a German woman living in Zürich, Switzerland, for an injunction forcing the German government to take action to limit operation of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

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There are many really great things about astronomy. One is that one can get quite far just with elementary physics and basic math.

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Today may mark the imminent end of US ambitions to lead space exploration. The "Vision for Space Exploration" (VSE) that former president Bush initiatied (however, neglecting to provide appropriate funding) may be axed.

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Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 13, 2010, a small asteroid called 2010 AL 30 (presumed diameter 10-15 meters) will buzz the Earth at just 1/3 of the lunar distance. The point of closest approach will be passed around 13:00 UTC (14:00 CET).   +++ Please also note the update at the bottom of this post. +++

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From November 25-27, 2009, I attended a workshop on the topic of "Methane in the Mars Atmosphere", held at the site of the European Space Research Institute ESRIN in Frascati, Italy. This is my summary of what went on there and what I learnt.

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A cold, dark rubble pile, a few kilometers across. He never ventures far from his lair in the asteroid main belt. No closer to the Sun than 2.5 AU, no farther than 2.7. His orbit is inclined by a mere 12 degrees ...  an asteroid can hardly be more common than that!

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The honor of being immortalized by the science fiction grandmaster Arthur C Clarke was bestowed upon only few living men. Alexei Leonov is one of them. Another one died not long ago.

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Attention astronomers: On November 13, 2009, the ESA comet chaser probe Rosetta will visit us Earthlings one last time. The spacecraft needs to gain momentum at Mars (once) and the Earth (three times) to boost its orbital energy sufficiently to reach the target comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. 

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On October 9, 2009 at 13:31 CEDT (11:31 GMT) the upper stage of the Atlas rocket used to launch the NASA lunar probe LCROSS will crash into crater Cabeus near the Moon's South Pole. Four minutes later, around 13:35 CEDT (11:35 GMT), the spacecraft proper will follow.

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Huh? "The Moons?" Do we have more than one? Well yes, at least, for some time, we did have two and we might yet again. Not so long ago, the Earth, with some help of our Moon #1, did grab a second moon.

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