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The Space Topic

Philae landed on the surface of a comet 510 million km away, travelling at over 130,000 km/h through space! It's anchored itself to the surface and started broadcasting telemetry back to ESA at Darmstadt.

A mission that's been 10 years in the making, with multiple passes round Earth and other planets in the inner solar system to gather enough speed to catch up with the comet, has finally reached a point where new science can happen! We've never landed on a comet like this and only get pictures from fly-bys, so now we can do real materials analysis and get up-close images of the surface of a comet.

I don't know about you, but that fascinates me!
 
So what are your thoughts on the Lunar Mission One? Personally I was a bit put off by the fact they were asking the general public to fund it and even more put off that I hadn't heard of it before. Then out of no where loads of people and well know scientists started to back it. I think it will be fairly cool to send a probe to the surface and dig down to do science and the added bonus of leaving stuff from earth there, kinda makes us feel a little bit more connected with the moon. Its also a UK based mission, so its good to back something we can be proud of.

Either way, share your thoughts and if you want to donate, the link is here
 
I was a little put off by the idea of them asking for funding from the public. Although I think it's a pretty neat idea, it engages the public with science (and space) which is pretty cool on the whole and makes people who back it feel like a part of something.
 
The eclipse was such a non-event - at least from my location, where it was stupidly foggy/cloudy. An hour later the skies were clear!
 
Meh, I didn't even bother getting up. I've seen two eclipses before and they aren't all that exciting.
 
Here is a stunning link for you all. The top 100 photos from the Hubble space telescope.

http://imgur.com/a/NtERY

A truly amazing machine which will sadly meet its end by de-orbiting and reentering the Earths atmosphere.

Here are some of my favorites.

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The Hubble ultra deep field. Amazing!
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Pillars of creation. New stars being born.
86qdJPa.jpg

Colliding galaxys. Can you imagine if we lived in one of these. We would be able to observe this happening to us. Totally powerless to stop it and it would probably end in our destruction.
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A supernova.
 
It look more like a partly controlled crash to me. However they are getting it more dialed in on each attempt, so wont be long till a successful landing and reuses.
 
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