Frida Space

I think the ascent is on the left and the descent on the right, because on the right you can see the final two reentry burns of the first stage. I think.

Except one of them has the right to be so, the other one is promising but has yet to achieve a tenth of what the other has done in the past few years. /ending muskfanboyism

Bezos went straight up, straight down. Yes, it's rocket science, so even that is incredibly challenging, and hats off to BO. But what SpaceX just did tonight is just a whole new level of complexity.

Wow. Jeff Bezos on Twitter: .... no words.

Mission success. All sats deployed.

Some screenshots I took so far. Yea, I love the SpaceX enthusiam, but still, if I were there I would cheer only after everything's over... different cultures I guess.

now that's a happy crowd

Upper winds are go! Orbcomm sats are in internal power and all systems are still go. Wohoo! Also, cool to have the Wait but why guy.

Launch is at 8:29 pm EST. Webcast has already started!

and.... explosions! but let's hope there will be none tonight Go Falcon, Go SpaceX!

Thank you for those great images, @lajoswinkler! Just briefly jumping into the discussion here, I'm somewhere half way between you guys. I've been talking to a couple of scientists in the last months and they all pretty much agreed that New Horizons confirmed a lot of what we already knew (for e.g. that Pluto has criovulcanoes [see Wright and Piccard montes], that the heart of Sputnik Planum corresponds to the biggest concentration of CO, that Sputnik Planum corresponds to the brightest longitude observed from Earth, that there could be an exchange of materials between Pluto and Charon [see Mordor Macula] and a lot of other things) but it also gave us so many more details and even showed us things we didn't expect would be taking place at Pluto (for e.g., many scientists I talked to didn't think Pluto's atmosphere would have allowed for such important volatile-transport mechanisms, many were expecting to find new moons [although it has to be said that most of New Horizons' moon-searching close-up campaign was lost due to the onboard computer failure some 9-10 days prior to C/A], plus no one had predicted such a high atmospheric escape rate [500 t/h] and a planetary geologist from Arecibo specifically told me that "the glacial flows hinted at by New Horizons are a whole new type of geological activity that we had never even thought of for Pluto"). So New Horizons has discovered a wealth of things we weren't expecting and, even when it "simply" confirmed things we already knew, it allowed us (or better, it will allow us) to gain much, much deeper insight into them. I hope no one is saying New Horizons wasn't worth it... if it was for me I'd send a probe to Pluto every two decades or so to see how it changes

Just want to add something that might be overlooked but that is actually of critical importance: after sat deployment, the upgraded second stage will test its reignition capability, which will be fundamental for the next launch (SES-9).

I'm totally not an expert in photography or optics but I don't think space cameras have a "zoom" feature (as far as I'm aware the Mars 2020 rover's Mastcam-Z will be the first with such a feature, or at least the first on the surface of Mars). Because the high res data in this image was taken with LRO's Narrow Anglew Camera, I'm assuming it's the small FOV of the camera herself that causes the Earth to appear so big. But I might be wrong.

"Upon further review of the static fire data, SpaceX has determined that an additional day prior to launch will allow for more analysis and time to further chill the liquid oxygen in preparation for launch. Please note that we will now be targeting launch for tomorrow, Monday, December 21 at 8:34 pm ET."

As you said, two Proton rockets, plus half of the 2018 mission (a science platform, that is) and multiple contributions here and there to the European probes. But I might be forgetting something.

The Antonov with first ExoMars probe (not sure wether TGO or Schiaparelli) has landed in Moscow. The other probe is still waiting in Turin.

Photo of Nix taken on July 14 at a range of about 14,000 miles (23,000 kilometers), the illuminated surface is about 12 miles (19 kilometers) by 29 miles (47 kilometers).

Nothing to say really, just wanted to share with you this beautiful Earthrise seen on October 12 by LRO. www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/lro-earthrise-2015

Indeed NASA was studying a flyby mission, however this Omnibus bill gives extra money to NASA on the agreement that they study an orbiter + lander mission instead.

Very interesting talks on Pluto and Charon geology (glacial flows, pitted regions, chaotic regions, snakeskin terrain, segments and islands in Sputnik Planuum, craters, subsurface oceans and so much more) so far at AGU15. I've uploaded the slides from the talks (120+ slides!) on Imgur in case anyone's interested. http://imgur.com/a/lQzBa

Yes, I meant "discovery" as "finding/result". Sorry for my poor English

However the article refers to a "750 GeV boson" and "pairs of photons of 750 GeV combined". This means that the photon pair has 750 GeV of energy, but each individual photon "only" has 375 GeV, meaning indeed that the boson has 750 GeV. This is confirmed when the article states that the possible boson "would be about 4 times more massive than the next heaviest particle discovered so far, the top quark". The top quark has a mass of 173 GeV/c^2, which means that the 750 GeV boson would be indeed about 4 times more massive. So it's a 750 GeV boson, not a 1500 GeV one.

Interesting discovery. Will have to follow it up with more results.