Europe’s space agency (ESA) just launched a behemoth of a spaceship to link up with the international space station (ISS), carrying a staggering 20 tons of freight with them. The payload apparently includes food, water, equipment and “Personal items”. One can only imagine, now they are testing sex in space, what that entails, but I digress.

I could spend time trying to explain exactly what this work of European tax-euro’s does exactly, but luckily the ESA has also created a nice, albeit a bit dry, video to explain exactly how things work, including some nice footage from the actual thing.

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It sounds like an awfully hard thing to do, but the WMAP NASA satellite is doing a damned good job at constraining some of the most important values of our Universe. This busy little fellah maps the sky every 6 months from its perfect position 1,5 million kilometers from the Earth. In this position, called the L2 Lagrangian point, the probe follows the Earth around the Sun and points its sensitive intruments away from the destructive light from the Sun, the Moon and the Earth at all time.

On February 28 2008, NASA released the results from the 5-year data of the satellite, and once again it astounds the World with its detailed measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, which is like the faint afterglow of the birth of the Universe, the so called Big Bang.

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