Two more eyes in the sky May 16, 2009
Posted by Sarah in science, space.Tags: astronomy, esa, herschel, planck
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The launch went beautifully on Thursday, and soon astronomers will have two more eyes in the sky beaming down exciting new data. Herschel and Planck separated successfully from their ride, sent a signal back to mission control to confirm that all is well, and are now both under way to their dark orbits at L2.
The thing with launches is that there’s a lot of excitement and build-up, but when all goes well there’s really not much to say about it. They launched, yay! Now begins the important commissioning phase (planned to begin today for Herschel, on Monday for Planck), where all the functions of the telescope and the instruments, and their performance is checked out.
So here is a round-up of some media and bloggy coverage…
Big news stories from the BBC, Guardian, Volkskrant (in Dutch)
The official launch page at ESA has also been updated with latest news and some great videos and images.
Blog updates by Stuart, Andrew, Peter, Robert, Phil – for full astro-blog listings check out Spacebuzz for tags “Herschel” and “Planck”
News on the missions’ dedicated blogs (Herschel, Planck)
Image: ESA/S. Corvaja
[...] it seem like yesterday, that exciting day when two new astronomy satellites were blasted into space? There was Herschel, at 3.5-m the largest [...]