At first I was delayed, I was on standby
Kept thinking I could never fly without repair missions
But then I spent so many years making sure it was ok
I grew strong, I learned how to be robust

In 1967, astronomers at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in the south of France discovered potassium flashes while they were observing stars. But the laws of physics that were known at the time didn’t provide any explanation as to how a star could produce these flashes. Were there aliens trying to communicate with us?

I wrote this image caption in the context of an application to a science journalism internship.

For a video I have been preparing about my trip to Spain with NASA (you can read about it in French here (part 1) and here (part 2)), I wanted to show Jupiter’s trojan asteroids, the asteroid Polymele and the spacecraft Lucy. I asked And0uille for help setting everything up in Space Engine. Here is her explanation on how to add everything you need in Space Engine to illustrate the Lucy mission.

Present-day Mars is cold and dry, but this has not always been the case, as findings from Mars rover confirm.

When Pluto was discovered, astronomers expected to find a planet similar to Earth in size. But as they made more observations, they realized that Pluto is actually much smaller than what they initially thought.

Today’s article is a bit special since it was written by @and0uille! She will explain in detail how to install your own castopod instance to host podcasts. If you want to see the end result before jumping in, you can visit the podcast SpaceSheep.

This morning we are with Sylvia Ekström who is an astrophysicist at the Observatory of Geneva. She studies the way massive stars evolve over time. She is also very involved in outreach at the Observatory of Geneva and in the entire region. She will tell us about stars and her atypical career.

Food in space is complicated. It has to be good enough for astronauts to actually eat it, it has to be healthy so that astronauts don’t end up sick, it has to keep for months at a time, it has to be compact,… To make things worse, in micro-gravity, your taste buds don’t work quite the same. For instance, Peggy Whitson discovered that in micro-gravity, she likes some foods that she didn’t like on Earth, but doesn’t like other foods that she usually loves. So feeding…

Between Mars and Jupiter, somewhere in the asteroid belt, you can find the dwarf planet Ceres. But this celestial object wasn’t always considered to be a dwarf planet.