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The European Space Agency's Herschel and Planck space telescopes are set to blast off on 14 May atop an Ariane 5 ECA launcher from French Guiana, the agency reports. The 'scopes are destined for "L2", the second Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system lying around 1.5m km from Earth. ESA explains that this is one of five …

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  1. D L Clements
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    Mission Blogs

    You can follow more about these missions on their blogs:

    http://planckmission.wordpress.com/

    http://herschelmission.wordpress.com/

    which I help maintain.

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  2. Alistair
    Happy

    Superb!

    A great bit of science there, well done ESA.

    Fingers crossed for the launch, eh?

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  3. Luis Ogando
    Paris Hilton

    Acronyms

    What? Who comes up with these acronyms?? Why do we not have a Nebula Observation Belt? Or a Far Away Reflective Telescope?? Or even a Primary Infra-red Space Spectrometer??

    I think there should be a think tank for this.

    Paris, 'cos she's got a Bright Energy Analogous Vector Enhancement Ray (or something)!

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  4. goggyturk
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    Awesome

    That's all.

    @ DL - Cheers!

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  5. Gianni Straniero
    Boffin

    L2

    I presume these scopes are destined to *orbit* L2 rather than occupy it. Might end up a bit of a squeeze once Herschel, Planck, Eddington, Gaia, the James Webb Space Telescope and Darwin all take up residence.

    Incidentally, I think it's rather neat that L2 is 1.01 AU from the Sun. There's something pleasing about the ratio between the gravitational strength of the Earth-Moon system and the Sun. A bit like the coincidence of the Sun and Moon's apparent size, which makes for such striking solar eclipses.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
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    @Luis

    You rock man, you must work at NASA or ESA. They will have to rename any missions just because of you!!!

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  7. Michael
    Happy

    Way to go!!!

    Annex the lagrange points before the military get their mitts on it!

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  8. Lukin Brewer
    Boffin

    For Science!

    I know I shouldn't have, but I immediately thought of Agatha Heterodyne: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

    They should have got Phil Foglio to design the emblem for them.

    The scientist, because it's the nearest thing they have to a Spark.

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