orbit

What Are Lagrange Points?

June 10, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Like gravitational parking spaces, Lagrange points provide locations where spacecraft can be positioned to conduct valuable scientific observations of the Universe and perhaps someday even offer foundations for more permanent human outposts. Named after Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who first proposed their existence [...]

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First-Ever Video of an ATV Vehicle Into Orbit!

June 6, 2013

Yesterday, June 5, the European Space Agency launched their ATV-4 Albert Einstein cargo vessel from their spaceport in French Guiana. Liftoff occurred at 5:52 p.m. EDT (2152 GMT), and in addition to over 7 tons of supplies for the ISS a special payload was also included: the DLR-developed STEREX experiment, which has four cameras attached [...]

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Bottoms Up! It’s a Year of Lunar Libration From Down Under

June 5, 2013

Do you live in the southern hemisphere? Are you tired of all those views of the Moon that favor celestial north as up? Well here’s a video just for you from the good folks at the GSFC Scientific Visualization Center — it shows the full 2013 year of lunar phases and libration as seen from [...]

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Time-Lapse: Earth

May 7, 2013

If you couldn’t tell, we love time-lapse videos… whether they’re made of photos looking up at the sky from Earth or looking down at Earth from the sky! This latest assembly by photographer Bruce W. Berry takes us on a tour around the planet from orbit, created from images taken by astronauts aboard the International [...]

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Warning Shot: a “Bullet Hole” on the ISS

April 29, 2013

Canadian astronaut and Expedition 35 commander Chris Hadfield just shared this photo on Twitter, showing a portion of one of the solar array wings on the ISS… with a small but very visible hole made by a passing meteoroid in one of the cells. In typical poetic fashion, Commander Hadfield referred to the offending object as [...]

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