Franck Marchis

September 23, 2011

UARS reentry visible from the Bay Area and elsewhere…?

If you have been following the news about space over the past 5 days, you may have heard about this gigantic 6.5-ton satellite dedicated to the […]
September 19, 2011

Talk about SpaceX and the Dragon Spacecraft at SETI Institute

Join us for the ninth SETI Institute Evening Distinguished Speaker Talk Wednesday night  at 7.00pm at the SETI Institute Headquarters at 189 Bernardo Ave, Mountain View. […]
September 15, 2011

Kepler-16: Exoplanets around binary star systems DO exist

Kepler-16 is another great discovery coming from the Kepler telescope, the 10th NASA Discovery mission which is devoted to finding Earth-size exoplanets by monitoring variations of […]
July 21, 2011

An Occultation by the double asteroid (90) Antiope seen in California

Last Tuesday July 19 at 3:25am PDT, several SETI REU students and colleagues from SETI institute and Observatoire de Paris were on the road. They were […]
May 6, 2011

NASA announced key pre-selected Discovery Missions

Today NASA announced three future key missions preselected as part of the Discovery program named GEMS, TiME and Comet Hopper. This is an important announcement, which […]
April 29, 2011

Allen Array Telescope and the SETI Institute

My previous post on the hibernation of the Allen Array Telescope got a lot of attention and I have been contacted by various people to discuss […]
April 22, 2011

Today the Allen Array Telescope is hibernating

First of all, a disclaimer: I am not NOT involved in the Allen Array Telescope, neither I conduct astronomical programs using radio telescopes. I am writing […]
March 29, 2011

NASA MESSENGER: Mercury has an orbiter (37 yrs after Venus)

I mentioned in previous posts in my blog significant results obtained by MESSENGER, the NASA Discovery mission  which had three flybys with the inner planet Mercury. […]
February 15, 2011

A Valentine night with Tempel-1 ?

Today is the night of Valentine day, I am not particularly romantic but I always tried to do something special for this day. Unfortunately, this year […]
February 10, 2011

Cosmic Diary Blog hosted at the SETI Institute

An important update for our readers. You may have noticed a lack of activity over the few days on this blog and a significant change in […]
February 2, 2011

A landslide of Kepler Exoplanet Candidates

There will be a before and after Kepler Era in astronomy. Today, with the release of 1,202 exoplanet candidates from data collected with the Kepler spacecraft […]
January 10, 2011

Kepler-10b – The first unambiguous rocky exoplanet

It is done. The Kepler team finally announced the discovery of its first terrestrial exoplanet. A referred journal, accepted in the Astrophysical journal (here) by Natalie […]