For my birthday, my son and fellow Star Trek aficionado gave me some DVDs with the old TV series. Needless to say, I have made a lengthy review of the subject lasting far into the evenings over the last week or so.

The extremely low operational temperature of just a tenth of a degree above absolute zero (0.1 K) has been reached on the detectors of Planck's High Frequency Instrument (HFI). This makes the HFI detectors the coldest known objects in outer space. The achievement, seven weeks after launch, marks a key milestone for the Planck mission. The spacecraft's active cooling system has now reached its final operational conditions and the two instruments onboard Planck (HFI and the Low Frequency Instrument, LFI) are now both at their cryogenic operational temperatures.

On June 27, 2009, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-O, soared into space during a spectacular launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. GOES-O has now been renamed and its solar array has been deployed.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) GOES-O satellite is the second in the GOES N Series that will improve weather forecasting and monitor environmental events around the world.

July 20, 2009 will mark the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's historic moonwalk. Having successfully won the race to the moon, the world, and Americans in particular, watched in awe as Armstrong bounded out of Apollo 11 and took the first steps on the moon's surface. Children everywhere expected their turn would surely come in the not-so-distant future and budding, or at least daydreaming, astronauts were born.

NASA's upcoming mission to study the sun in unprecedented detail and its effects on Earth, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla. on July 9. The spacecraft left NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on July 7, where it was built and tested.