Posts for April, 2011

April 14: To mark Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight, “Yuri’s Night” and “YuriGagarin50” teamed up with the astronauts onboard the International Space Station to film a new view of what Gagarin would have seen as he travelled around the planet.

April 13: Space now affects our everyday lives and makes an important contribution to the economies of the world. This is the legacy of the early days of spaceflight, but it is often also associated with Yuri Gagarin and the astronauts who followed him.

April 12: 50 years ago, for the first time in history, a human travelled into space. Who was Yuri Gagarin? How did this flight change his life and the future of humankind?

April 8: Astronomers have come up with a new way of identifying close, faint stars with NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer satellite. The technique should help in the hunt for planets that lie beyond our solar system, because nearby, hard-to-see stars could very well be home to the easiest-to-see alien planets.

April 8: After three and a half years of thrusting silently through the void, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is on the threshold of a new world. It’s deep in the asteroid belt, less than 4 months from giant asteroid Vesta.

April 4: A nova in Sagittarius has been discovered by Koichi Nishiyama, in Kurume, Japan, and Fujio Kabashima, in Miyaki, Japan. Please report all observations to the AAVSO as V5588 SGR.