Piggynap’s Blog | Zoe Piper

Hooray for space stuff! Here are my latest cool space stories:

Space Shuttle Discovery has been retired, and here are some pretty cool pictures of technicians taking it apart for cleaning. It basically looks like it’s made from tinfoil

Hers is a NASA video commemorating the space shuttle, narrated by William Shatner:

Apostolos Christou and David Asher have discovered a pretty neat Asteroid called SO16 that has a similar orbit to the earth. Most asteroids have unstable orbits, but this one is following us around and could stay on the same path for a million years.

An article on the BBC talks about a red giant, seen by the Kepler telescope, that doesn’t emit sound waves like stars usually do. This isn’t what interested me though – what did is that in 2001 the BBC reported on the first sound waves to be measured from a star other than our sun. That’s just ten years ago yet now it’s mentioned off-hand like it’s nothing special at all

Chandra Wickramasinghe is talking at York Astro society this Friday about the antiquity of cosmic life. More info is on the York Astro events page.