What Are Those Dark Spots All About? Time late for a current events type post, but this article discusses some key questions scientists were asking – and I assume hoping to find out once New Horizons took as much data as it could during the July 14, 2015 closest approach fly-by. We are starting to …
New Horizons: Pluto Photos Leading up to the Closest ApproachRead More »
The Pluto Fly By Is Done – So What’s Next? The Pluto fly by today was fabulous, and it will take about 16 months for all the data New Horizons took to actually make it back to Earth for analysis. I had no idea it would take that long, but thinking about that, 3.65 billion …
Excitement Is Building! New Horizons passed by Mars’ orbital path in April of 2006, did a Jupiter fly by in Feb 2007 and crossed Saturn’s orbital path in June of 2008. At over 51,000 miles per hour, it had already traveled 1 billion miles to get that far, but wasn’t even half way yet, even …
Excitement Grows As The Europa Mission Gains Momentum Liquid water is key to life and because of that, Europa may be the most likely place to find life in our solar system. There is just too much evidence we can see on the surface to ignore that possibility. What is even more exciting is that …
New Mars Images So far, most of my posts have been fairly long documentaries about various aspects of our solar system. But once in a while, truely amazing things can happen that do not take much time to show their importance. That is the case with this video series. Only 9+ minutes long, but these …
New Horizons – Pluto and Beyond So, if you can’t see Pluto well enough from Earth telescopes, what do you do? NASA said … send a probe to see. And that’s what New Horizons is all about. This documentary is a fascinating history of how Pluto was discovered, its moons, evidence that it was actually …
Intriguing Ideas About How Our Solar System Came To Be Four big mysteries are discussed … why Mars isn’t about the same size as Venus and Earth, how the outer planets formed, what is the composition of the asteroid belts and why the moon was bombarded so heavily that it left the surface permanently cratered. …
(Video) 2015 National Geographic Documentary – The Latest Secrets of the Solar SystemRead More »
Can Kepler Find Us A New Earth? Unlike other missions, instead of looking to see what we can see, Kepler is looking for another planet like Earth. The French in an international effort and the USA are both looking, so the race is on! Both have found candidates, including the possibility of water. New tools …
(Video) Kepler – Combing The Heavens For Another EarthRead More »
The Universe As Only Hubble Can Bring Us … It all started with a grand idea, well before the capability to put a telescope in space even existed. That became a project called the Hubble Telescope, but was soon one of the biggest, and embarrasing engineering blunders in our time. Through engineering genius and several …
Bad Day For SpaceX! Even though we remember the Challenger like it was yesterday … I still take space flight for granted. But it simply isn’t easy to break away from Earth’s gravity, which has been part of the commentary that followed the launch attempt. Everything looked great with the SpaceX CRS-7 until 3:20 on …