Hello,

I am back from a long trip in Europe where I visited my collaborators at the IMCCE and at the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon. I took a few days of vacations in the northern part of Moravia to enjoy the snow, see my inlaws and my family and teach skiing to my kids. I am back since Monday night, and obviouly I am completely jet-lagged. So the post today will be short and most informative for the people living in the Bay Area

I mentioned on this blog on several occasions (see “the first light“) the Kepler mission which aims at detecting exoplanets through the transit method (a.k.a the small attenuation of light due to the passage of the exoplanet between us and the host star). Last week, during the AAS  (say “double ‘A’ ‘S’”) conference, the Kepler team announced the discovery of the first 5 exoplanets.

Some news about this interesting target. As a reminder, it will make its close flyby on Wednesday January 13 at 12:46 pm UT (4:46 pm PST) so in a few hours, when it will pass at 122,000 km from Earth.

The new hype in our community: 2010AL30, a 10-60m asteroid will be passing at 1/3 the distance Earth-Moon on Jan 13. Interestingly because its period is 1 year, like Earth, it was suggested that it could be a man made object.

I did not write on this blog for almost 15 days. The vacation time came shortly after the AGU meeting and I basically spent a lot of time with my family. So this post is primarily written to wish all of you a Great New Year 2010 and to give you news about the future of this blog.

Fifteen days ago, I wrote a short post on this blog to let you know that I was flying to Cleveland, OH to meet colleagues interesting in space mission design. Without realizing it, this project has been taking over all my time and my energy (including nights of work and thinking) and produced a roller-coaster of excellent and bad news. Because it is still uncertain what exactly it is going to happen I will not mention it today, but I will keep you posted as soon I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Today I will focus my post on a very positive note which is the session Mercury and the Messenger mission that I attended at the AGU Fall conference.

How will be our planet if it has a ring? I found this interesting video on the web that I wanted to share with you. Surprisingly I wrote this 7 days ago and apparently forgot to publish it.

I am observing today.. again are you thinking? You are right, I am spending way to much time in a control room of a telescope, but tonight it is a bit special since I am observing from UC-Berkeley in a   room where I can remotely control the 1m Nickel telescope at Lick Observatory.

Last April, I mentioned in this post this interesting cinematic documentary named “400 years of Telescope“ produced and directed by Kris Koenig, written by Donald Goldsmith, Ph.D. , Albert van Helden, Ph.D. and Mr. Koenig. Interestingly I somehow became involved in this amazing work. here the story…

Last June, I mentioned the LCROSS mission which was aimed at impacting the surface of the Moon. 113 days after its journey, this event indeed happened on October 9 2009. At 04:31 UT the Centaur upper stage rocket  hit the surface, followed by LCROSS itself at 04:39 UT.  It was recorded by several telescopes located at Hawaii and in the US (where it was visible) and by another NASA spacecraft called Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in orbit around the moon.