Here’s our beautiful blue marble as seen by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on Sept. 22, 2017 from a distance of 106,000 miles (170,000 km). It had just completed a gravity-assist flyby of Earth—a little 19,000 mph “once around the block” that gave the spacecraft an 8,500-mile-an-hour speed boost necessary to adjust its course toward Bennu, the…
Tag: Pacific
SpaceX Nails Another Landing at Sea—This Time in the Pacific!
Today, January 14, 2017, SpaceX achieved another commercial launch success with the delivery of ten Iridium satellites to orbit—the first of 70 that will comprise the next generation IridiumNext constellation—as well as a new milestone in its ongoing trek toward reusable launch capability: the first successful landing of a Falcon 9 first-stage booster on…
Dragon’s Splashdown! (VIDEO)
This just in! A video of the SpaceX Dragon capsule descent and splashdown into the Pacific at 8:42 a.m. PT on May 31, 2012, taken from a P3 chase plane. I think a lot of people (including me) have been waiting to see this! Awesome! (Can’t see the video above? Click here.) Video: NASA
The Dragon Returns!
This morning, at 4:49 a.m. CDT, after 5 days, 16 hours and 5 minutes attached to the International Space Station, SpaceX’s Dragon craft was released and made its return to Earth. It splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 10:42 a.m. CDT, about 530 miles southwest of Los Angeles, off the coast of Baja California….
South Pacific
Another beautiful image of Earth from the Rosetta spacecraft’s OSIRIS imaging system, showing swirling clouds in an anticyclone over the South Pacific. The false-color composite is a portion of a larger view of the planet, taken as Rosetta flew by Earth on November 13. It is a combination of image data taken through the orange,…
Lights in the Dark 