Month

A large asteroid will pass by Earth on Monday/Tuesday (Jan 26-27) providing amateur astronomers a unique viewing opportunity. An asteroid is considered to be of considerable concern when it is larger than 100 meters and passes within 20 Earth-to-Moon distances. Asteroid 2004 BL86...

European Space Agency (ESA) Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain briefed the media on January 16, 2015 for the traditional start-of-year press conference on the activities and challenges for 2015. Dordain discussed the 22Aug2014 failure of the first two Galileo full-operational...

As of this writing, the search for the AirAsia Flight QZ8501 ‘black boxes’ is now entering the third week. Searchers are homing in on these data recorders (see my recent blog post here) but the difficulties are reminiscent of the two-year search needed to find the...

There has been conflicting news today regarding the so-called ‘black boxes’ (cockpit voice and flight data recorders) of AirAsia Flight QZ8501. A senior Indonesian government official was quoted as saying “The navy divers in Jadayat state boat have succeeded in...

If you have seen the image of the robot mosquito, it looks very impressive. Various websites have described it as being perfectly camouflaged. It can spy on you without you even realizing that it is not an insect. There’s just one small problem. It is not real. It is not...

On December 30, 2014, prior to the discovery of the wreckage of Air Asia Flight 8501, Michael Braasch was interviewed by George Putic of the Voice of America (VOA) about aircraft disappearances in 2014. Braasch notes the key issues are cost and politics, not technological...

Although the season is somewhat artificial, the restart of the 12-month calendar has traditionally been a time both for reflecting on the past and looking ahead to the future. 2014 saw the sad disappearance of two transport jets: one for just a couple of days; the other still has...