Updates in this Newsletter- IISAC2015 Booking and Registration Open!
- New JPL Video: Approaching Titan a Billion Times Closer
- Dawn Delivers new image of Ceres
- Beagle2 Lander Found on Mars!
* IISAC2015 Booking and Registration Open!
Welcome to 2015! IISAC2015 is now less than 2 months away. Make sure you get those annual leave dates booked in and start earning those brownie points now! I've brought the party forward to March, ahead of Easter and the school holidays.
IIASC2015 is being held on the 19th-21st March 2015, again in the beautiful Hunter Valley region of NSW, at Lostock.
Find out more about IISAC2015 by
heading to the info page, or jump straight to
registration at the IceInSpace Shop.
If you've never been to a star party before, if you've never seen the Milky Way under a dark sky, you just have to come along. It's a great event for the whole family - you don't need to own a telescope, and you don't need to be an IceInSpace member. Everyone is welcome, and I hope to see you there.
* New JPL Video: Approaching Titan a Billion Times Closer
I have a soft spot for the Huygens landing on Titan, as it occurred in January 2005 - over 10 years ago and right at the beginning of my journey in Astronomy. Everything was new and exciting.
"This new, narrated movie was created with data collected by Cassini’s imaging cameras and the Huygens Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR). The first minute shows a zoom into images of Titan from Cassini’s cameras, while the remainder of the movie depicts the view from Huygens during the last few hours of its historic descent and landing."
Well worth 3 minutes investment of your time. Watch at
ScienceDaily.
* Dawn Delivers new image of Ceres
Staying in the Solar System, this fantastic new image of the minor planet Ceres was captured by the Dawn spacecraft on Jan 13, 2015, from a distance of 383,000 km.
"Over the next several weeks, Dawn will deliver increasingly better and better images of the dwarf planet, leading up to the spacecraft's capture into orbit around Ceres on March 6. The images will continue to improve as the spacecraft spirals closer to the surface during its 16-month study of the dwarf planet"
Read more and see a great animation of Ceres rotating at
phys.org.
* Beagle2 Lander Found on Mars!
Another fantastic story to finish up our round-up of news stories about the solar system!
On December 25, 2003, a British-built lander dropped to the Martian surface and disappeared without a trace. Now we know what happened to it thanks to brilliant imaging by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The HiRISE camera has captured so many amazing images (who can forget this incredible
image of the descent of the Phoenix Lander!?), and has been on a quest to find the missing Beagle 2 lander.
Based on images taken in February 2013 and March 2014, it appears the lander has been found.
Read more and see the images at
Sky&Telescope.
Thanks for reading! Keep looking up!
