we recently took a few months break to redesign the site and whatnot, so this week’s issue is a recap of some of the stuff we missed. nothing comprehensive, just some nice images we came across, like this photo of the ESA Automated Transfer Vehicle approaching the international space station
_lastly, we’d like to pay our deepest respects to the brilliant visionary Arthur C. Clarke, who passed away on March 19, with thousands attending his funeral in his adopted homeland, Sri Lanka. of all the images we could have chosen (think 2001: A Space Odyssey), we thought this simple cover from hisProfiles of the Future makes a fitting tribute. it shows a geosynchronous communications satellite, one of Clarke’s predictions, floating high above the sea, which he also loved. a keen scuba diver, being weightless underwater was sadly the closest he ever got to floating in space. rest in peace Arthu
_in April, CERN opened up the Large Hadron Collider for the last time before it starts smashing particles together in August. we visited our namesake for a tour of the tunnels and experiments, and took so many pictures our camera broke. we’ll do a full post in the next few weeks
_later in January, a joint team of UK, US, Chinese and Australian astronomers travelled to Antarctica’s remote Dome Argus ? a high plateau that’s been visited by fewer humans than have walked on the moon. in the cold, crisp air, they set up PLATO ? a fully robotic observatory should enjoy skies twice as clear as anywhere else on earth
_it looks like the moon, but this is actually Mercury. In January, NASA’s MESSENGER probe reached the planet closest to the sun, capturing images of its never-before-seen hemisphere and the Caloris Basin, a giant crater that’s probably filled with precious metals for us to mine in the year 3000
_photo: ESA
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