Brussels, February 24, 2020 – The NASA InSight mission to Mars has benefited from a significant contribution from scientists of the Royal Observatory of Belgium since its inception. They have located the landing site, reconstructed the landing trajectory and helped interpret the seismic data. The journal Nature Geoscience just published a series of articles that present these results, obtained after [...]
NASA will launch the Solar Orbiter spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, with 10 scientific instruments on board, including the space telescope Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI). Solar Orbiter is an ESA mission, with an important contribution from NASA, which will study the Sun from close up. The EUI instrument was built by a European consortium under the leadership of the Centre Spatial [...]
In 2019, 45 earthquakes and 14 induced earthquakes were located by the Royal Observatory of Belgium in or near Belgium. One earthquake, one induced event and one quarry blast were felt in Belgium. The largest event occurred on 23 June 2019 in Dessel (Belgium, ML=2.1). No damages have been reported this year in Belgium. [...]
Nervia and Eburonia are the new official names of the star HD49674 and its exoplanet. This was decided by the 1300 participants in the Belgian vote, whose purpose was to determine the winning proposal among the four pre-selected name pairs. [...]
Sébastien Le Maistre, researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, will receive the Georges Vanderlinden Prize from the Royal Academy of Belgium (Science Class). This distinction, which will be awarded to him on Saturday December 14, rewards his years of research in data processing for Martian missions. [...]
Brussels/Antwerp, 7 November 2019 – The Belgian instrument LaRa (Lander Radioscience) is accepted for integration on the Kazachok platform of the ExoMars 2020 mission. [...]
On November 2, the ESA satellite PROBA2 will be celebrating its 10th anniversary. Not too bad for this small Belgian spacecraft that was initially intended for a two-year mission! [...]
Solar scientists from the Royal Observatory of Belgium launched the citizen science project Val-u-Sun. This project, open to everyone, allows citizens to help research by counting sunspots from their archive. [...]
Brussels, 18 October 2019 – Ever closer to the Sun! The instrument EUI (Extreme Ultraviolet Imager) is integrated into the Solar Orbiter satellite to be launched towards the Sun in February 2020. Today, Solar Orbiter can be seen for the last time before being shipped to Cape Canaveral, the launch site. [...]
A special report from international experts was released on October 10, 2019, to explain the challenges of space weather and to provide a set of recommendations against radiation hazards in space. David Berghmans, of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, is a co-author of the report. [...]