At the end of June, ESA’s six astronaut candidates were thrown out of a helicopter, left to drift at sea and abandoned under the hot Mediterranean sun. Fortunately, their survival training allowed them to cope with the tough situations.
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The Farnborough International Air Show opened to blue skies and trade visitors today. Highlights included innovative passenger aircraft, a supersonic car and a dedicated Space Zone showcasing space technology and its importance to the world.
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Asteroid Lutetia has been revealed as a battered world of many craters. ESA’s Rosetta mission has returned the first close-up images of the asteroid showing it is most probably a primitive survivor from the violent birth of the Solar System.
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On 10 July, ESA’s Rosetta will fly past 21 Lutetia, the largest asteroid ever visited by a satellite. After weeks of manoeuvres and a challenging optical navigation campaign, Rosetta is perfectly lined up to skim by at 3162 km at 18:10 CEST.
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2010 July 20 
Have you ever watched a lightning storm in awe? Join the crowd.Oddly, nobody knows exactly howlightning is produced.What is known is that charges slowly separate in some clouds causing rapid electrical discharges(lightning), but how electrical charges get separated in clouds remains a topic of much research.Lightning usually takes a jagged course,rapidly heating a thin column of air to about three times the surface temperature of theSun. The resulting shock wave startssupersonically and decays into theloud sound known asthunder. Lightning bolts are common in clouds during rainstorms, and on average6,000 lightning bolts occur between clouds and the Earth every minute.Pictured above, anactive lightning storm was recorded overAthens,Greece earlier this month.
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Space helping to rebuild the economy and drive economic growth were thecentral themes of Space Day at the Farnborough air show on Wednesday.
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2010 July 22
FredericChurch (1826-1900), American landscape painterof the Hudson River School, painted what he saw in nature.And on July 20th, 1860, he saw a spectacular string offireball meteorscross the Catskill evening sky, an extremelyrare Earth-grazing meteor procession.From New York City, poetWaltWhitman (1819-1892)also wrote of the “… strange huge meteor procession,dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads” in his poemYearof Meteors (1859-60).But the inspiration for Whitman’s words was forgotten.His astronomical reference became a mystery,the subject of scholarly debateuntilTexas State University physicists Donald Olson and Russell Doescher,English professor Marilynn Olson, andHonors Program student Ava Pope,located reports documenting the date and timing of thespectacular meteor procession.The breakthrough was spotting theconnection with Church’s relatively little-known painting.Fittingly, theforensicastronomy team’s work was just published, on the 150th anniversary of thecosmic event that inspired both poet and painter.
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ESA PR-16 2010: ESA, together with the UK Space Agency, the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and industry, will be exhibiting in a dedicated Space Zone at the Farnborough International Air Show, 19–25 July.
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A start-up company supported by ESA’s Business Incubation Centre has developed a new mobile phone indoor navigation system, which will soon help the six million annual visitors find their way around at the largest exhibition centre in Paris.
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At a workshop last month in Stuttgart, 40 business professionals met with EC representatives to discuss which European policy measures could best support the use of information provided by satellites for new services of ‘public interest’.
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