Liquid Rock, Stars, Space Rocks and Rock Stars

My ' boarding pass', enroute to Mars. Happy landings ...

Farewell to the historic Dawn - a probe which  became the first in our history to visit two different bodies in the asteroid belt, returning a wealth of information to increase our understanding of the early formation of the universe.
Dawn ceased communication with the Deep Space Network on October 31st , and it is believed that the craft ran out of  the fuel , hydrazine .
Dawn will remain in orbit around Ceres for a few decades.
It feels odd, but even as I write this, I'm aware that Dawn is already history; it launched in 2007: since then, in terms of ground - breaking, we've landed craft on a comet , hopping(!) rovers on an asteroid, had multiple take-off and landings of re-usable rockets , used a 'skycrane' to land another explorer on Mars ( and inserted the Mars Orbiter ) , had an up close flypast of Pluto and its moon, Charon, gathered info from Saturn and its moons, and Voyager 1 became the first craft to enter interstellar space. (I'm sure there are many more, and I apologise for any omissions) Every one of these was a 'ground-breaking' achievement, and I am both amazed and humbled by it all.
Go, humanity !

A large impact crater has been discovered beneath the Greenland ice sheet, dating back at least 12000 years.
Speaking of comets, the comet which helped eradicate the dinosaurs from Earth has been shown to have liquified huge amounts of rock , albeit briefly; still on the subject of space rocks, Oumuamua is heading away from us now, but NASA have learned even more about this perplexing 'traveller' from beyond. Buried amidst the excited chatter of how its 'albedo' gives us an estimate of its size, was the quiet revelation that it changed speed and direction.
This was apparently due to outgassing , but that relies on Oumuamua being an icy body, rather than a rocky one - Hmm - I'm almost tempted to see what the ' fringe' elements think - but even Harvard scientists believe that it may be an alien probe...


The ongoing search for alien life is being hampered by the demand for GPUs being used for cryptocurrency mining. Personally, I'd say the problem is also being exacerbated by the new demand for VR graphics. One of my pet theories is that portals to our multiverse exist in these burgeoning virtual spaces, so perhaps it's advantageous (or did I just play too much  Half - Life..? )

Before VR, there was humble anaglyph 3-D, and this new volume of images, lovingly prepared by none other than Queen guitarist, and Professor of Astrophysics, Brian May, adds a new dimension to a slew of images from the moon missions.

One of the oldest stars in the universe is hiding in a distant corner of our own Milky Way . At 13.5 billion years old, it is a remnant from just after the 'Big Bang' ( okay, .22 billion years after, but that's close)

Stunning image of the Jovian clouds from Juno


I was entranced by the image of swirling gaseous cloud -tops of Jupiter, my feverish imagination wondering how it would feel to travel into such a broiling mass - of course, it would probably be anti-climactic, as Jupiter has no solid rocky core, so the curious onlooker would find themselves eventually back in space, possibly with a battered sign attached to the windshield / viewport, saying ' Thank You for driving carefully through our Jovian funk '
Speaking of large clouds in our corner of space, the Mars Explorer has been observing a curious cloud in the equatorial region of the ' Red Planet '; which brings us neatly to the pending arrival of Insight on Mars, on the 26th of  November . I will be watching with crossed fingers, as my avatar will be aboard...

Designed to measure seismic activity , Insight will be a static lander, which has already attracted much online speculation ; apparently the designated landing site is close to a crashed ufo , and a walled city...

Apparently, a crashed ufo on Mars...        pic: NASA