Herschel
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STFC and UKSA
Funding for space missions in the UK was split from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to the the UK Space Agency earlier this year. Very roughly, UKSA will fund the missions themselves all the way through to the processing of data, while STFC will fund the science that comes from analysing the data. To…
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Herschel Papers (and a few words about Planck)
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Results from the first major science papers from the Herschel Satellite were released this week at a conference in Holland. Launched almost a year ago on the same rocket as Planck, Herschel is an infrared and sub-millimeter telescope, which lets it see not only the stars that generate the visible light we see with our eyes…
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Doctors, Deep Fields and Dark Matter
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Luckily, not all the astrophysics news this week was so bad. First, and most important, two of our Imperial College Astrophysics postgraduate students, Stuart Sale and Paniez Paykari, passed their PhD viva exams, and so are on their ways to officially being Doctors of Philosophy. Congratulations to both, especially (if I may say so) to…
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Launch!
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Cross-posted on Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog. Planck and Herschel are en route to their orbit at L2! We were about 7.5 km from the launch, at the “Agami” viewing site. Here is my golden ticket: We all milled around for half an hour, snapping pictures of friends, eminent scientists, and at…
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Launch Blog — Day 2: Rollout
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Cross-posted on Andrew Jaffe’s Blog and the Planck Mission Blog. Today we saw the rollout of the gargantuan Planck/Herschel Ariane 5 rocket, when they move it from its assembly building to the launchpad. Spectacular! There are plenty more pictures, and some movies, which I’ll try to edit and post shortly. At the end of the…
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Pre-launch blitz
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With less than a week to go before its planned launch, The Planck Surveyor Satellite has been loaded into the fairing of its Ariane 5 rocket along with its sister satellite, Herschel. It is scheduled to be rolled out to the pad on May 13, and the launch window opens on May 14 at 13:12…
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STFC Consultation results
No time for a full blog post, but I wanted to point out the results of the STFC Consultation, now available. Some of my favorite projects like AstroGrid seem to have not fared too well (the consultation panel rated it highly, but PPAN, responsible for the final ranks, disagreed). Nonetheless, Imperial Astrophysics projects like Planck,…
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Big Smoke Science
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In his comment on last week’s post, fellow physicist blogger Tommaso lets me know that he’ll be attending a meeting that we’re hosting here at Imperial College next week, Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model. We’ll be casting a critical eye over current cosmological models and data, but I expect most of us will…
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