It’s no secret that I read lots of space news. If I find a piece of news fascinating, then I Tweet it. For those of you not following me on Twitter, I’m going to start a weekly series that summarises the top space news that I’ve Tweeted. I’ve divided it up in to five categories: Spaceflight: all about
The holidays are over and it’s time for an Exoplanet Explorer update. The HD version gets 22 new planets that were announced in the past month or so. Both versions get some minor improvements and bug fixes. Amongst the new planets are two terran worlds in the habitable zone of their stars! Kepler-438 b At 1.27 times the Earth’s mass, this rock
In the early 1840’s, our Solar System had seven known planets. At this time, a French mathematician named Urbain Le Verrier, discovered that Uranus’ orbit may have been disturbed by a large unknown planet. Some years later, in 1846, Heinrich d’Arrest announced the discovery of Neptune. This new planet didn’t fully account for Le Verrier’s calculations, so the hunt for
China and Russia have both recently been discussing plans for mining a valuable element on the Moon. They are interested in Helium-3, an isotope that is rare on Earth, but “relatively” abundant on the Moon where it is deposited by the Solar winds. Helium-3 is desirable for use as fuel in fusion reactors. It can release a great deal of energy
Some months ago I received an Advertising ID policy violation for an old app that I had no intention of updating. To avoid being punished by Google, I immediately unpublished the offending app, and also unpublished a second app that could potentially trigger the same violation. Both apps received few downloads and I had no plans to ever
In January 2006, the New Horizon spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral on a decade long journey to visit Pluto. In late August of the same year, about mid-way between Mars and Jupiter, the little probe would have received word that Pluto had been re-classified a “dwarf planet”. Approximately eight years have passed since then. In
This has to be one of the most impressive astronomy photos I’ve seen in a while. It’s an image of a disc of material orbiting the star HL Tau, 450 light years away. You can clearly see gaps in the disc where planets are forming as they sweep up all the material while orbiting the
Well, it turns out I was right. Version 5.4.146 of the Amazon’s API was broken. Back when 5.4.146 was released, I updated Easy Amazon Ads and tested it. At this point I discovered that closing an interstitial with the X button would stop the app loading any more interstitials for the duration of the session. Basically, the
This week’s update enables free flight mode as seen in Solar Explorer. This lets you use traditional thumb-stick style touch controls to fly around any of the solar systems you can visit in the app. Free flight mode can only be activated while in a system, near a planet. This is restricted because of the way navigation is
With the new Exoplanet Explorer apps out for nearly a week now, I’ve had some feedback and time to fix some minor issues and make improvements. What’s new The ghostly labels that looked like a fog appearing near the center of the screen are now gone. A side effect of the Tegra fix. They didn’t